David Fletcher
HONORARY RESEARCH FELLOW
RELIGION, THEATRE, AND THE ANTITHEATRICALS: New English drama, 1660 - 1720
One of the most transformative features of the changing religious and cultural landscape in England after the Restoration was the reopening of the public theatres. This reawakening generated a rich repertoire of new plays. My research examines how the new plays written between 1660 and 1720 treated religion, broadly conceived, and what they tell us about both drama and attitudes to religious institutions and faith.
England in the late Stuart Age was a society in which religion was ubiquitous and highly contested, where rafts of legislation backed up by persecution attempted to impose religious uniformity, and where a monarch was ejected partly because of his faith. But, at the same time, one of this society’s most prominent cultural representations - the stage - projected a negative attitude to religion – its theology, its ceremonies, its personnel, and its institutions. By the 1690s this negative attitude had come under attack from a group of polemicists - the antitheatricals - who saw the theatre as a place of danger and argued for its reform or even its suppression.
The theatre was one of the chief places in which religious scepticism, satire, and even hostility and ridicule were openly expressed, as many of its critics at the time claimed. One of the leading critics, Jeremy Collier, opened his famous 1698 attack on the stage with the statement that ‘nothing has gone farther in Debauching the Age than the Stage Poets, and Play-House’. The distinctiveness of drama, compared to other genres, is that it incorporates the very things that Collier and others saw as a danger – an appeal to the emotions, unpredictability, an unsettling of conventions, disrespect for authority, a charge of sexual energy, and challenges to the prevailing truth and the established order. Some of the plays even touched on disbelief, exposing a space where the growing sense of religious scepticism could thrive. Also, what no other genre could provide was to bring together a large group of people into an enclosed space to share the experience of laughing at religious characters.
Many new plays of the period engaged with religious issues and included in their cast lists a wide range of religious characters, both clerical and lay. My research demonstrates that most of these characters are shown in a negative light. Many of these portrayals were used to attack specific religious groups at times of conflict, but the relative absence of positive religious portrayals means that any counterbalancing force was limited. The remorselessness of these negative portrayals raises the question of the attitude shown in these plays to religion in general and how, in some cases, it shaded into irreligion or a manifestation of what one character calls ‘a damn'd Atheistical Age’.
Literary scholars have analysed the plays for their political, social, and cultural importance, and religion has been reflected to some extent in this work, but the plays have not been studied primarily through a religious lens, as this study seeks to do. Similarly, historians have researched and written in depth about religion in this period, but drama has only featured in a minor way as one of many sources, and so my research also seeks to historicise the drama. Religion was one of the most ubiquitous issues of the period and the stage was one of its most striking cultural representations. My research brings together for the first time these two fundamental elements of life in England – religion and the stage - through the whole of the long Restoration period.
PUBLICATIONS
'The Atheism Spectrum—Forms of Atheism in Restoration Drama' in Rethinking Atheism in the Early Modern World, ed. Patrick Seamus McGhee (Palgrave Macmillan, February 2026).
‘A Herd of snivelling, grinning Hypocrites’: Religious Hypocrisy in Restoration Drama in Studies in Church History 60 (2024), 290–311. (Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Ecclesiastical History Society, May 2024).
'The clergy and marriage in Restoration Comedies', in Religion and life cycles in early modern England, eds. Caroline Bowden, Emily Vine and Tessa Whitehouse (Manchester University Press, October 2021).
Bubble Fever. A new audio-play about the South Sea Bubble based on the works of Daniel Defoe. A collaboration between University of Warwick History Department, Warwick Words, and the Loft Theatre, Leamington Spa. The play, plus an introductory essay, is published by Digital Defoe, at digitaldefoe.org
CONFERENCE PAPERS AND OTHER WRITING
The False Count. An abridged version of the play by Aphra Behn for a rehearsed reading at the Warwick Restoration Conference, July 2026.
‘Quaking dress’: Quaker identities on the English stage, 1700-1720. Warwick Restoration Conference, July 2026.
Reconciliation and religious coexistence in new plays after the Glorious Revolution. The Bangor Conference on the Restoration, University of Bangor, July 2024.
Religion and the plays of Aphra Behn. Aphra Behn and her Restoration, Aphra Behn (Europe) Society's 8th International Conference, University of Kent, July 2024.
The Trials of the Black Dwarf: Radical Jonathan Wooler in the early Nineteenth Century - a dramatisation. A collaboration between University of Warwick History Department, Warwick Words, and the Loft Theatre, November 2023.
Christians as a minority sect in English drama, 1660-1720. Ecclesiastical History Society Summer Conference, July 2023.
The Atheism Spectrum – forms of atheism in Restoration drama. Rethinking Atheism in the Early Modern World - An Interdisciplinary Workshop, University of Durham, March 2023.
‘Prerogative Royal and absolute power’ – James II’s Declarations of Indulgence. Rule of Law workshop, Warwick, January 2023.
‘Passeing upon the road’: The mobility of nonconformist clergy after the 1662 Great Ejection. The Bangor Conference on the Restoration, University of Bangor, July 2022.
“The Popish Plot in a play” - Anti-Catholicism on the English stage, 1679-1681. Warwick History Postgraduate Conference 2022.
“A Stage-Sermon, or a Pulpit-Play” - Theatricality, and the liminality between the stage and the pulpit, 1660-1714. Pulpit, Playhouse & Page, University of Sheffield, May 2021.
Quaking Dress - representations of Quakers on the English stage, 1700-1720. English Theatre Culture 1660–1737, Online Symposium, Masaryk University, Brno, April 2021; and Disruptions to authority, 1450-1750 Compliance and challenge in early modern society, Royal Historical Society conference, June 2021.
"Enthusiastical or Fanatical Atheists" The Court Wits and Religious Identity. A Warwick PG Podcast with Hannah Straw and Maria Tauber.
Plots about plots in The Lancashire Witches by Thomas Shadwell. Plots, Cabals, and Conspiracies: the sociability of intrigue in the long eighteenth century, Sorbonne-Universite, January 2020.
The Trial of Queen Caroline - a dramatisation. A collaboration between University of Warwick History Department, Warwick Words, and the Loft Theatre, November 2019. An audio recording is now available free on the Loft Theatre website. Free audio recording
The Ballad of Lady Bessy: a new play about women and power in late 15th century England. Performing Power in the Pre-Modern World, University of Warwick, November 2019.
'Hypocritical Religionaries' remembered in Restoration drama. Bangor Conference on the Restoration, University of Bangor, July 2019 and Ecclesiastical History Society Winter Meeting, January 2023
‘Nick them slab-dash with the ceremony’: The Clergy and Marriage in Restoration Comedy. Religion and the Life Cycle, 1500-1800, Queen Mary University of London, July 2018.
'Strangers and pilgrims on the earth’ - The mobility of nonconformist clergy after the 1662 Great Ejection. ‘Parishes and Migration’, Sixteenth Warwick Symposium on Parish Research, University of Warwick, May 2018.
ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
2023 - present: Honorary Research Fellow, Department of History, University of Warwick
2016 - 2023: PhD candidate in History, University of Warwick
2015 - 2016: MA in Religious, Social & Cultural History, University of Warwick
2012 - 2015: Executive Director, National Opera Studio
2004 - 2012: Executive and Finance Director, Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames.
2003 - 2021: Trustee of the Young Vic Theatre.
1994 - 2003: Director of Finance and Administration, Royal Shakespeare Company
1982 - 2013: Bachelor of Arts, Open University
