Nevitt, M. (2025) The politics of restoration playbook dedications. History of European Ideas. ISSN 0191-6599
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).
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in History of European Ideas is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Keywords: | Aphra Behn; dedications; Exclusion Crisis; Jacob Tonson; patronage; playbooks |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 30 Jun 2025 15:06 |
Last Modified: | 14 Jul 2025 09:26 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Taylor and Francis Group |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/01916599.2025.2528402 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:228534 |
Downloads
Filename: Nevitt, Play Dedications Final Pre-Print Version (MN).pdf
Licence: CC-BY 4.0
Filename: The Politics of Restoration Playbook Dedications.pdf
Licence: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0