Abstract
Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great (1677) draws on the legend of Alexander the Great, widely known in the Renaissance as an extraordinary man, soldier and conqueror, though also an ambivalent figure in both Eastern and Western traditions, depicted as a magnificent king and empire-builder, but also a despotic tyrant. Lee’s play, Chapter Nine argues, drew both on the ambiguity of Alexander as a cultural figure and his function as a mediator of concerns of otherness in its portrayal of Alexander’s story. Persian identity is more central to The Rival Queens than it was to Settle’s Cambyses; Lee’s Persia figures as a dying empire, given to luxury and effeminacy, representing a dangerous temptation for Alexander, who allows himself to adopt a Persian identity. The Rival Queens uses Alexander and his Persian identity to facilitate debate on a number of issues which were pressing in the 1670s, thus constituting the kind of covert criticism to which Charles’ rule was vulnerable during this period. Persia’s particular associations with luxury, tyranny and effeminacy again made it a useful context for exploring such questions on the Restoration stage.
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Notes
- 1.
Yenne, Alexander the Great; Pierre Briant, Alexander the Great and His Empire, trans. by Amélie Kuhrt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Thomas R. Martin and Christopher W. Blackwell, Alexander the Great: The Story of an Ancient Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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J. M. Armistead, ‘Lee, Nathaniel (1645×52–1692), Playwright and Poet.’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 September 2004. Oxford University Press, Date of access 28 September 2018 http://www.oxforddnb.com.idpproxy.reading.ac.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-16301 [Accessed 9 August 2022]. See also J. M. Armistead, Nathaniel Lee (Boston: Twayne, 1979).
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A. Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 345–46; P. F. Vernon, ed., Nathaniel Lee: The Rival Queens (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), p. xiv; David M. Vieth, ‘Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens and the Psychology of Assassination’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700, 2.2 (1978), 10–13 (10).
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Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740), p. 64.
- 5.
Vernon, Nathaniel Lee: The Rival Queens, pp. xv–xvii.
- 6.
Quarto versions of the play were printed in 1677, 1685, 1690, twice in 1694, and in 1699. See Nancy Lewis, Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens: A Study of Dramatic Taste and Technique in the Restoration (PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 1957), p. 5.
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Vernon, Nathaniel Lee: The Rival Queens, pp. xv, xxiv; Vieth, ‘Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens and the Psychology of Assassination’, p. 10.
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Su Fang Ng, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
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Ng, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia, p. 17.
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Ng, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia, p. 17.
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Ng, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia, p. 21, quoting Josef Wiesehöfer, ‘The ‘Accursed’ and the ‘Adventurer’: Alexander the Great in Iranian Tradition’, in A Companion to Alexander Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. by David Zuwiyya (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 113–32 (pp. 114, 124).
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Markus Stock, Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Transcultural Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), p. 6.
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See J. M. Cook, ‘The Rise of the Achaemenids and the Establishment of Their Empire’, in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. by I. Gershevitch, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 209–91 (p. 206).
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Vernon, Nathaniel Lee: The Rival Queens, xxii.
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Cox, ‘Neo-Roman Terms of Slavery in Samson Agonistes’, 8, quoting John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume III, 1648–1649, ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 190.
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Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, VII, 323–24, VIII, 288, quoted in Susan J. Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 1.
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Joanna Rickman, Love, Lust, and License in Early Modern England: Illicit Sex and the Nobility (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 5. See also Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in the Seventeenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Laurence Stone, The Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
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Quoted in Paul Hammond, ‘The King’s Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II’, in Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 1660–1800, ed. by Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 13–48 (p. 21).
- 66.
N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 98.
- 67.
Quoted in Hammond, ‘The King’s Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II’, p. 22.
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Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama, p. 1; See also Laura J. Rosenthal, ‘Masculinity in Restoration Drama’, in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. by Susan J. Owens (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 92–108.
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Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex Between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 172.
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Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; repr. 2003), p. 109.
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The information on Charles’ reign in the 1670s in this paragraph is drawn from Paul Seward, ‘Charles II (1630–1685)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-5144?rskey=HDNfrN&result=1 [Accessed 11 August 2022].
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Seward, ‘Charles II (1630–1685)’.
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Houston, C. (2023). ‘The King, Who Loves the Persian Mode’: Tyranny and Excess in Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens (1677). In: Persia in Early Modern English Drama, 1530–1699. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22618-2_9
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