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This thesis explores Shakespeare's Restoration afterlife, claiming that a succession dispute known as the Exclusion Crisis (1678-1682) helped to rescue his plays from obscurity. In addition to exploring what the Crisis can tell us about Shakespeare's authorial afterlife the thesis contends that the ten Shakespeare alterations produced between 1678 and 1682 provide insights not only into the politics of the period, but more specifically into the problematic implications of the ‘rape rhetoric' circulating in the late 1670s and early 1680s.

Ten radically altered versions of Shakespeare's plays appeared on stage between 1678 and 1682, partly in response to what is known as the Exclusion Crisis. The plays differ from earlier Shakespeare alterations in a number of important ways and mark the most intense period of Shake- speare rewriting since the playwright's death. By separately considering the two media for which the plays were designed, the stage and the page, and by exploring the way Shakespeare as author-source was presented in the paratextual material accompanying the plays onto the stage and the page respectively, this essay suggests that reverence for Shakespeare and claims of textual ownership varied according to medium, thus offering conflicting views of Shakespeare to late seventeenth- century audiences and readers of playbooks. These conflicting views, I contend, are intimately linked to unequal levels of stage and page censorship during, and as a direct result of, the Exclusion Crisis. The essay offers a case for seeing the Exclusion Crisis as one of the most significant points in Shakespeare's authorial afterlife.

This chapter seeks to focus on an aspect of Milton’s alleged Puritan persona, namely his iconoclasm. Since E. B. Gilman’s subtly nuanced Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (1986), it has become fashionable to discuss Milton the iconoclastic polemicist or to debate the extent of his iconoclastic poetic strategies. All too often this criticism rehearses the old Puritan / Laudian binary and assumes that Milton the Puritan is intrinsically iconoclastic. Yet, as the notorious 1632 Star Chamber trial of Henry Sherfield demonstrates, Calvinist iconoclasm was but the most extreme end of a rich spectrum of Protestant attitudes to images in seventeenth-century England. By reading Milton’s embodied representation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Paradise Lost in the context of the Sherfield trial, I hope to make the case for a more iconophile poet, thus rescuing Milton from the refashioning conducted by later writers and critics.

This chapter examines the use of connoisseurial rhetoric by Shakespeare editors and critics over the course of the eighteenth century, beginning with Alexander Pope in 1723–5 and concluding with George Steevens in the 1780s and 1790s. Connoisseurship was originally developed by art critics as a discourse for authenticating paintings and drawings. Beginning with Pope, however, literary editors began to draw upon it as an analogy for representing authorial style. As I shall show through an examination of Steevens’s work in compiling the first chronological catalogue of William Hogarth’s prints and paintings, this convergence between art criticism and textual criticism involved more than a simple exchange of metaphors. Connoisseurship offered critics such as Steevens new ways of looking at artworks and assessing their genuineness, modes of vision that could be applied as readily to plays as to paintings. The eighteenth-century art market relied upon the expertise of the connoisseur, who could guarantee that a given painting stemmed from the hand of a particular master. Shakespeare publishing in the eighteenth century likewise came to depend on the expertise of the editor, who could reliably identify Shakespeare’s personal style and distinguish the genuine from the spurious.