Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700–1832 by Daniel Gustafson (review)

Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700–1832 is a timely book. This project follows the many and varied afterlives of the Restoration stage rake, and more specifically, the “persistent fantasy of and fascination with the autonomy of sovereign rule embedded within a discourse of personal liberty and political rights” (5). As such, it represents a compelling contribution to ongoing discussions about sovereignty, power, and the modern liberal subject that we encounter in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Steven Pincus, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Daniel Gustafson approaches this topic with an attentive and informed eye to performance theory and, particularly, to Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains (2011) and Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire (2003). As “an embodied praxis and episteme” (Taylor 17), performance is a medium through which specific figures, scenarios, and poses reappear. It offers a means of rethinking historical narratives and their attendant literary canon(s), which have long cordoned off history into discrete blocks like the Restoration and the Romantic periods. Moving chronologically, Gustafson traces the persistent reemergence of the rake figure and the associated scenarios that structured Restoration drama and evolving ideas of personal liberty into the early nineteenth century. Generally, his literary history is not focused on the sporadic revivals of Restoration dramas, but rather, he sifts through the archives, discovering the “residual force” (Raymond Williams) of the libertine figure, which has, he argues, informed the evolving and intertwined genealogies of absolute power and liberal conceptions of governance (Williams, cited on 10).