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Nathaniel Lee.
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One of the three leading tragedians of his day, Nathaniel Lee, as J. M. Armistead observes, led the move away from "awe-inspiring characters and happy endings--typical of tragi-comedies and heroic pla...
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In the following essay, Barbour argues that the vast majority of Lee's plays do not fit into the usual mold of Restoration-era heroic drama, since Lee's work was nearly always critical o...
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In this excerpt, Brown argues that The Rival Queens represents one of the era's earliest experiments in moving away from heroic action to affective tragedy, a form Lee mastered in Lucius Junius...
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In the following essay, Brown examines four of Lee's plays—The Massacre of Paris; The Princess of Cleve, Theodosius, and Lucius Junius Brutus—works that the critic says belie Lee&...
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In the essay below, Brown focuses on two plays written collaboratively by Lee and John Dryden—Oedipus and The Duke of Guise—maintaining that Lee's contribution to the plays was ev...
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In the following essay, Knutson argues that Lee's The Princess of Cleve is an artistically inferior effort to the French novel that served as its source.
Like many works of the French classical...
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In the following essay, the critics examine Lee's adaptation of Madame de La Fayette's novel La Princesse de Clèves, declaring that Lee's Princess of Cleve is “a pio...
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In this essay, Cooke and Stroup argue that Constantine the Great was a political play that made veiled references to contemporary events, including the Popish Plot and the Rye House Plot.
Several scho...
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In the following excerpt, Loftis examines the stage history of Lucius Junius Brutus, focusing on the play's anti-monarchical themes, which caused the work to be banned by royal order.
The first...
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In the essay that follows, Vernon explains why The Rival Queens was so popular in its own time as well as why the play opened itself to ridicule by later generations of theatergoers, who found many of...
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In the following essay, Vieth argues that the key to understanding Lucius Junius Brutus lies in the author's use of fantasy and myth to expound tragic features of generational conflict.
The bri...
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In the essay below, Hume argues that The Princess of Cleve was an angry satire written during a period when the playwright was undergoing profound changes in his own political opinions.
Scholars have ...
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In the following essay, Kastan argues that Nero is one of the earliest dramas to find fault with the political solutions initiated by the English Restoration.
Many critics of Restoration tragedy have ...
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In this essay, Armistead rebuts long-standing criticisms of Sophonisba, arguing that the play's two plots are masterfully interwoven in order to explore the theme of heroism in the modern world...
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In the first essay below, Armistead argues that while Caesar Borgia is a play with few overt political overtures, it is nevertheless full of psychological and moral undercurrents that show the corrupt...
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Nathaniel Lee
Critical Essay by Frances Barbour
