How are chances for social rise in England and its colonial contact zones negotiated in the freshly reopened theatres of the 17th-century Restoration era? This project explores the staged debates about social concepts of merit, forms of social rise and a politics of change against the backdrop of a transcultural setting in restoration England and its theatre. Restoration drama offers multiple projections of upward-mobility and self-realisation in spaces torn between outward-oriented colonialist-explorative projects on the one hand and internal processes of finding a viable system of conviviality and political organisation in the aftermath of civil war on the other.
Researcher: Maria Pace Aquilina
