Pope-Burning Pageants: Performing the Exclusion Crisis

Abstract

On November 17, 1677, Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician was performed at Dorset Gardens by the Duke of York's Company. All we know of the play comes from a letter of Andrew Marvel: “Today is acted the first time Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician where my Lord Shaftsbury and all his gang are sufficiently personated. I conceive the King will be there.” Though we are offered little else, the fact that Shaftsbury and his gang are ridiculed is, I think, enough to situate the play fairly with other royally endorsed parodies of the Whig party that found a ready marketplace in the King's Theatre in the years of fervent, 1677–1683. Plays such as John Crowne's The Ambitious Statesman (1679) and City Politiques (1682), Thomas D'Urfey's Sir Barnaby Whig (1681) and The Royalist (1682), and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1681) all were having no end of sport lampooning the Whig platform, with scarcely the benefit of a rebuttal.