Swift, Gulliver, and Travel Satire

Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) stands in a long tradition of travel satire that emerged in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Travel and the travel book represent essential, constitutive elements of the story, serving as vehicle as well as subject matter for satirical treatment. Swift draws on established attacks on the traveller’s identity and how it becomes dislocated in travel, and the accusation of lying often levelled against travellers. Swift’s genius lies in taking this critique to a new extreme, and by structuring the story in a way that makes the form of travel writing collapse in on itself. His forebears include Thomas More, Rabelais, Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, George Etherege, and a host of critics writing on the art of travel (ars apodemica), like Joseph Hall and James Howell.

Renovating the Stage: Companies, Actresses, Repertoire, Theatre Innovations, and the Touring Companies

Within three months of Charles II’s return, the London theatres were reopened, with two companies granted royal patents. Thomas Killigrew formed the King’s Company, and William Davenant the Duke’s Company. Initially the repertoire consisted of pre-war plays, with those of Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher popular. Regular theatre-goer Samuel Pepys recorded his approval of the new actors such as Thomas Betterton, Edward Kynaston, and Charles Hart, and actresses including Nell Gwyn and Elizabeth Barry. The companies invested in new theatres incorporating continental designs for proscenium arches, scenery, and effects at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Dorset Garden. Dramatists providing new plays included John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, and George Etherege.