SOURCE: Stocker, Margarita. “Political Allusion in The Rehearsal.” Philological Quarterly 67, no. 1 (winter 1988): 11-35.

In the following essay, Stocker contends that The Rehearsal is both political and literary satire, not one or the other as many critics claim.

The Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal¹ (1671) has usually been regarded as a purely theatrical burlesque, of which the central butt is Dryden, in the character of Bayes. Its extensive allusions to heroic drama, in both Bayes' “mock-play” and the “commentary” dialogues surrounding it, evince “shrewd insights into the condition of Restoration drama.”² Although George McFadden has suggested that the play has elements of political satire,³ such suggestions are still greeted with considerable scepticism.⁴ Partly this is because of a resistance to the notion that literature can be “reduced” to topicality. It should be said at once, however, that political concerns do not necessarily reduce a text to sub-literary status. Nor is it...