SOURCE: Canfield, J. Douglas. “Regulus and Cleomenes and 1688: From Royalism to Self-Reliance.” Eighteenth-Century Life 12, no. 3 (November 1988): 67-75.

In the essay below, Canfield detects a “postrevolutionary attitude” of disillusionment in Crowne's Regulus and John Dryden and Thomas Southene's Cleomenes, plays written after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.

In “Royalism's Last Dramatic Stand: English Political Tragedy, 1679-89,” I concluded my analysis with John Crowne's Darius, Thomas Southerne's Spartan Dame, and John Dryden's Don Sebastian, plays that reaffirmed Royalist political values, especially loyalty, in the teeth of the so-called Glorious Revolution.¹ It should not be surprising that the next political tragedies by these three playwrights—Crowne's Regulus and Dryden and Southerne's Cleomenes, both produced in 1692—would reflect a Royalist postrevolutionary attitude.

Yet Crowne's play begins with a prologue full of jingoistic, anti-French sentiment in apparent support for William III's war policy. And the epilogue concludes thus: “The French, ay and some English...