CREMS Research Seminar - 'Theatre and News Culture: Dramatizing the News in Royalist Pamphlet Plays of 1648-49.'

This paper focuses on a number of royalist pamphlets which were published between 1648 and 1649 within the context of the second civil war, the trial and execution of Charles I, and the abolition of the monarchy. Full of topical references, outrageous polemics and political satire, these pamphlets are commodities of the mid-seventeenth-century market in news. However, they are set apart from other news pamphlets in that they dramatize their news items as plays. Due to their dramatic layout, these texts have often been read as plays evincing an assumed cultural resilience of English drama during the closure of the theatres. In contrast, I will argue that these pamphlets are hybrid texts which hover on the generic boundary between news publication and drama. As pamphlet plays, they draw on both the news reports of their time and the tradition of early Stuart drama in order to attack and discredit any non-royalist faction. Paying particular attention to the pamphlets’ dramatic elements, I will show how the royalist pamphlet plays of 1648 and 1649 stage their news in an attempt to structure and, thus, make sense of events which many royalists experienced as a loss of coherence and a crisis of common sense. 

Lena Steveker teaches British literary and cultural studies at Saarland University in Saabruecken in Germany. Her research interests are contemporary British fiction and early modern English drama. Her current research project is on theatre and news culture in early modern England, 1620-1660. A list of Lena's publications can be found here: http://www.uni-saarland.de/lehrstuhl/frenk/research/dr-lena-steveker-publications.html