SOURCE: Staves, Susan. “Authority and Obligation in the State: ‘Let Majesty no more be held Divine.’” In Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration, pp. 43-73. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

In the following essay, Staves analyzes heroic drama in the political context of the years immediately following the Restoration.

I

The issues which erupted into the civil war were not solved by that war but remained for Englishmen to struggle with until nearly the end of the seventeenth century. In particular, the revolution failed to define the limits of the king's authority over his subjects. It merely weakened the executive in certain specific areas—there was no longer a Star Chamber, for instance—and postponed the fundamental problem. The nature of the subject's obligation to the powers set over him was perhaps even less clear. Henry Neville was essentially correct when he wrote in 1681, “we are...