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In 1649, after their victory in the Civil War, the English Parliamentarians put King Charles I on trial. Within days, he was found guilty of treason, and beheaded. What followed was a period of Puritanical rule under Oliver Cromwell, the so-called Interregnum. Theatres remained closed and numerous laws were passed in an attempt to raise the moral standards of the nation.
But was the Interregnum a time of "repressed and repressive" writing, as one might assume? A time of cultural poverty? To answer this question, we will explore and discuss a wide variety of texts from this often overlooked period in English literary history: from royalist Cavalier poetry, which continued to celebrate the joys of beauty, love and drinking, to the cryptic works of Henry Vaughan and his brother Thomas (a self-proclaimed mystic and "natural magician"); and from Margaret Cavendish's astonishing poetry and prose to the revolutionary foundational texts of the English Dissenters. |
