ABSTRACT

This speech bespeaks an ideal relationship between education and democratic involvement in the political life of the nation; it also implies a hostility to monarchy and, in its surrounding narrative, a fully fledged theory of republicanism. It was spoken on the London stage in 1680, for less than a week, before the play that promoted these values was suppressed. Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus was performed in December 1680 for either three or six days (the records conflict) and was shut down by order of the Lord Chamberlain, for reasons that are obvious if one recognizes the tensions of the historical moment (at the height of the

Lord Chamberlain, for reasons that are obvious if one recognizes the tensions of the historical moment (at the height of the Exclusion crisis) and the contemporary significance of theancient history (the founding moment of the Roman republic) that Lee was here resuscitating. The speech with which I begin was delivered by Lee’s Brutus to Collatine, and it expands on Livy by making Brutus more consciously populist, more democratic, than the original account of the expulsion of the Tarquins required. As John Loftis remarked, in editing the play for the Regents Restoration series, “Any English play about Lucius Junius Brutus had to be a Whig play.”1 In his own dedication to Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, earl of Dorset,2 Lee connected Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy to “Shakespeare’s Brutus,” who must surely be the Lucius Junius of The Rape of Lucrece, not his successor in Julius Caesar, and added that Shakespeare’s character “with much ado beat himself into the heads of a blockish age, so knotty were the oaks he had to deal with.”3 I take it his protest is still applicable.