Stuart Period

The 17th century is divided into two by the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 and the temporary overthrow of the monarchy. With the return of Charles II as King in 1660, new models of poetry and drama came in from France, where the court had been in exile. In James I's reign, high ideals had combined with daring wit and language, but the religious and political extermism of the mid-century broke that combination. Restoration prose, verse and stage comedy were marked by wordly scepticism and, in Rochester, a cynical wit worlds away from the evangelicalism of Bunyan. When Milton's Paradise Lost came out in 1667, its grandure spoke of a vanished heroic world. The representative career of Dryden moves from the 'metaphysical' poetry of Donne to a new 'Augustan' consensus.


The Stuart period of English and British history refers to the period between 1603 and 1714, while in Scotland it begins in 1371. These dates coincide with the rule of the Scottish royal House of Stuart, whose first monarch to rule England was James I & VI. The death of Queen Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, without any descendants and without an English heir, left her two kingdoms of England and Ireland to be ruled by Elizabeth's closest heir, the Scottish king. The regicide of King Charles I brought a temporary end to the rule of the Stuarts, when England became a Republic under Oliver Cromwell. The Stuarts were restored to the throne under Charles II in 1660. The Stuart period ended with the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George I of the House of Hanover.

The Stuart era experienced many changes: the Gunpowder Plot, civil and foreign wars, the regicide of a king, a republic, the great plague, the Great Fire of London and the Glorious Revolution. This was the era of Shakespeare, Wren, Galileo, Newton and Pepys, to name but a few. The era saw the settlement of the Americas, trade with the Spice Islands, the birth of steam engines, microscopes, coffee houses and newspapers.

Stuart Dramatists to 1642
(with best known dates and approximate date of first performance)

George Chapman (?1554-1634), Bussy D' Ambois (1607)
Thomas Dekker (?1570-1632), The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599)
Thomas Heywood (?1574-1634), A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603)
John Marston (?1557-1634), The Malcontent (1604)
Cyril Tourneur (?1557-1626), The Atheist's Tragedy (1611)
John Webster (c.1578-c.1632), The White Devil (1690), The Duchess of MAlfi (1612-1613)
John Fletcher (1579_1625) with Shakespeare, Henry VIII (1613) and Two Noble Kinsmen (1613-14); several plays with Beaumont
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), (?) The Revenger's tragedy (1607). The Changeling (1622, with Rowley), A Chaste maid in Cheapside and A Game at Chess (1624), Women Beware Women (1620-7).
Philip Massinger (1583-1649), The Fatal Dowry (1618), A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625)
Sir Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), The KNight of the Burning Pestle (?1607), The Maid's Tragedy (c.1610, with Fletcher)
John Ford (1586- after 1639), Tis Pity She's A Whore (1633)