The double logic of Don Sebastian

Huntington Library Quarterly

Volumn 63, Issue 1-2, 2000, Pages 47-69

  Kroll, Richard ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 65849397375     PISSN: 00187895     EISSN: 1544399X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3817864     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. See Katherine Eisaman Maus, "'Playhouse Flesh and Blood': Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress," ELH 46 (1979): 595-617.
2. Andrew Barnaby and Lisa Schnell, Literate Experience: The Work of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century English Writing (forthcoming, 2002).
3. See Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery: Its Origin and Development in the British Theatre (London, 1952), 114.
4. Even after 1688, the tensions inhabiting the debate have a great deal to do with the fact that British constitutional theory was still largely customary, and the king's powers were rarely thought of in contractual terms; the contractual view was associated with radical and Whiggish thought to which few parliamentarians were sympathetic, and it is a marked feature of the period between 1688 and 1690 that the contractarian arguments presented by Locke in the Two Treatises in 1690 failed to appeal. See esp. J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689-1720 (Cambridge, 1977), 2, 200
5. and David Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III (Oxford, 1966), 139-43.
6. The two most comprehensive treatments of the Glorious Revolution are J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (New York, 1972)
7. and W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (New York, 1988). The simultaneous reference to the contractual and the customary is important to my conception of this play; Don Sebastian legitimates custom as a ground of political appeal, for example, when the custom of marriage resists Muley-Moluch's attempt to revise it for his own interests (3. 1. 75-80).
8. J. P. Kenyon, Stuart England, 2d. ed. (Harmondsworth, England, 1985), 246.
9. The accusations emerged from William's intense personal relationship with William Bentinck and seem already to have been current in 1689. See "Satire on Bent[in]g" (March 1689), in John Harold Wilson, ed., Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus, Ohio, 1976), 217-21. Wilson notes that the "private reasons" alluded to in line 16 "were presumed to be homosexual" (222 n. 15).
10. A Satyr upon King William; Being the Secret History of his Life and Reign (London, 1703) is a defense of William, but addresses the rumor: "As for that Unnatural Vice which some said he was addicted to, (to my certain knowledge) he was as free from it, as Lot when he left Sodom" (B1v).
11. In his commentary on Don Sebastian for the California Dryden, Earl Miner writes, "The historical king of Portugal disdained any interest in women and is thought to have been homosexual"; The Works of John Dryden, vol. 15, ed. Earl Miner and George Guffey (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), 388.
12. Don Sebastian and Amphitryon are quoted from the California edition, cited above, n. 6. Important readings of Don Sebastian include David A. Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), chap. 2
13. and Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1993), chap. 6.
14. See John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings, 2d. ed. (Cambridge, 1922), 143-44
15. and Ogg, England in the Reigns of James II and William III, 166-67. Figgis, a near contemporary of Sir James Frazer (whose Golden Bough is about myths of kingship), often proves a more sensitive guide to the notion of kingship than more modern scholars.
16. Though the final decision of the Convention Parliament, in intense negotiations with William, was to declare that James II had abdicated, not deserted the throne, which was "thereby become vacant," that was only the least uncomfortable and untenable of several fictions that were debated early in 1689 (on this debate, see E. Neville Williams, The Eighteenth-Century Constitution, 1688-1815: Documents and Commentary [Cambridge, 1960], 20-26).
17. All parties were agreed that by fleeing to France, the king had forfeited his right to rule, and legal opinion influencing the deliberations of the Convention Parliament was that the king's legal authority had lapsed the moment he left England. See J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles, 10
18. and Stuart England, 275
19. Keith Feiling, A History of the Tory Party (1924; reprint, Oxford, 1959), 275.
20. On divine-right theory, see J. P. Somerville, in Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London, 1986), who reads early-seventeenth-century drama as simple propaganda for what he calls the "absolutist" view rather than one more arena in which constitutional questions are tested (p. 50).
21. Gordon Schochet limits the scope of his analysis both by treating divine right theory as roughly synonymous with patriarchalism and Filmer's Patriarcha as a digest or epitome of patriarchalist attitudes; Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes (Oxford, 1975), 5.
22. Figgis, by contrast, treats the fact that Filmer uses a kind of natural law argument based on Genesis as marking a decisive moment when natural law theory begins to subvert a more baroque and less systematic mentality; Divine Right, 152-60.
23. James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, Conn., 1987), xiii.
24. Bywaters, Dryden in Revolutionary England, 55.
25. The most impressive indigenous primer in casuistry, Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium, was published throughout the Restoration period: (1660, 1671, 1676, 1696).
26. For example, A Letter from a Clergy-Man in the Country, to the Clergy-Man in the City . . . Shewing the Insufficiency of his Reasons . . . for not Reading the Declaration (London, 1688), 26. Dryden's remark comes at 2. 1. 199, where the Mufti says, "He prates as if Kings had not Consciences. " Other references to the debate about conscience occur at 1. 1. 482, 2. 1. 171-213, and 3. 2. 94-100.
27. The parallel with Julian the Apostate - which enters into much of the literature of the Revolution - was largely owing to a series of tracts written by Samuel Johnson, the first of which he published in 1682, in which in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis Johnson intended the offensive parallel between the duke of York and Julian. In Julian the Apostate: Being a Short Account of his Life (London, 1682), Johnson writes: "the Christian Souldiers served under this Infidel Emperor, and where their Religion was not concern'd, made Conscience of obeying him; but where indeed it came to the Cause of Christ, there they made as much Conscience of disobeying him. " xxv.
28. Johnson's tracts supply a direct polemical connection between the Exclusion Crisis and the Revolution. Julian the Apostate was published thrice in 1682-83, with a "third" edition in 1688 and a "fourth" in 1689.
29. Similarly, the reader is told, in Johnson's Julian's Arts to Undermine and Extirpate Christianity (London, 1689), that "[t]he present Impression of this Book was made in the Year 1683" (A2v).
30. A Discourse of Conscience. The Second Part. Concerning a Doubting Conscience (London, 1688), 6.
31. See Alan Roper, "Commentary," The Conquest of Granada, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 16, ed. John Loftis et al. (Los Angeles, 1978), 411-35.
32. See Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1857), 1:440.
33. Maitland makes the simple point that strictly according to law, they were right; F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge, 1919), 283-85.
34. DNB; see also Miner, "Commentary," Don Sebastian, in Works of Dryden, 15:382.
35. Thomas Pierce, A Prophylactick from Disloyalty (London, 1688), 3, 5.
36. A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), 1:311.
37. John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660-1688 (Cambridge, 1973), 201-2.
38. Louis I. Bredvold, The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1956), 161, 163.
39. George Hickes, The Doctrine of Passive Obedience (London, 1689), 2.
40. Agreement betwixt the Present and the Former Government (London, 1689), 53.
41. See H. V. Livermore, A New History of Portugal (Cambridge, 1972), 162-63.
42. Mary Elizabeth Brooks, A King for Portugal: The Madrigal Conspiracy, 1594-1595 (Madison, Wis., 1964), 4.
43. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York, 1989), 196.
44. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 194.
45. See, for example, 1. 1. 500; 2. 1. 3 ("The thoughts of Kings are like Religious Groves," which I take to be an allusion to Oedipus at Colonus); 2. 1. 275; 2-1-583; and 4. 2. 72-74.
46. Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, Or, The Rule of Conscience in all her Generall Measures; Serving as a Great Instrument for the Determination of Cases of Conscience, 2 vols. (London, 1660), 1:11: "There are many actions in which prudence is not at all concerned as being wholly indifferent to this or that for matter of advantage; but there is no action but must pass under the file and censure of Conscience. "
47. Augustine Frezer, The Divine Original and the Supreme Dignity of Kings, No Defensative against Death (Rotterdam, 1685), 5.
48. James Ellesby, The Doctrine of Passive Obedience (London, 1685), 2.
49. Edovardus Confessor Redivivus (London, 1688), 33.
50. Anthony Ascham, A Seasonable Discourse (1649; reprint, London, 1689), 47.
51. Sebastian anticipates his own end in very similar terms: "I'll shew thee / How a Man shou'd, and how a King dare dye! / So even, that my Soul shall walk with ease / Out of its flesh, and shut out Life as calmly / As it does Words; without a Sigh, to note / One struggle in the smooth dissolving frame" (3. 1. 214-19).
52. Some Considerations Touching Succession and Allegiance (London, 1689), 5-6.
53. Agreement betwixt the Present and the Former Government; Or, A Discourse of this Monarchy, Whether Elective or Hereditary? (London, 1689), 33.
54. Richard Booker, Satisfaction Tendred to all that Pretend Conscience for Non-Submission to our Present Governours (London, 1689), 2.
55. Ascham, Seasonable Discourse, 46.
56. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London, 1998), 218.