SOURCE: Wheatley, Christopher. “‘Power Like New Wine’: The Appetites of Leviathan and Durfey's Massaniello.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22 (1992): 231-51.

In the following essay, Wheatley analyzes the political and social themes of Durfey's Massaniello, a play based on an Italian peasant uprising.

Traditional descriptions of Restoration political drama as “Whig” or “Tory” are sometimes irrelevant to plays that lack an immediate topical application to English political events: Thomas Durfey's two part The Famous History of the Rise and Fall of Massaniello is an example of a play that defies such classification. Although unsuccessful when it premiered in 1700 at Drury Lane,¹ the play is of interest dramatically for its deft juxtaposition of the comic and serious, and for its subject: the 1647 peasant rebellion in Naples led by the fisherman Thomas Aiello.² A playwright identified only by the initials T. B. made the rebellion the subject of a tragedy in 1649, and...