The theater of the world turned upside down

When Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down was first published in 1972, it was an immediate popular success. Issued in paperback in 1975, it sold 46,000 copies in that single year; a decade later, it continued to sell 3,000 per annum. As impressive as such sales figures are for a work of seventeenth-century history, they tell only part of the tale of the popularity of the book. In the mid-to-late 1970s, it also became a touchstone for dramatists and theater practitioners seeking to recover a sense of Britain's radical past, eager to examine the ways in which historic patterns of resistance, revolutionary politics and popular rebellion might speak to a later age of social unrest. This essay offers a reading of Keith Dewhurst's The World Turned Upside Down, an adaptation of Hill's work performed by the Cottesloe Company at the National Theatre for 3 weeks in November and December 1978. Although Dewhurst's play met with a mixed reception from its first reviewers, I suggest that the drama offers a sensitive and careful re-reading of Hill's book, acutely alert both to its shortcomings and its rejection of a severely economic-determinist model of Marxist historiography.