The series of events known as the "Popish Plot" and the political confrontation on the issue of succession between king and parliament known as the Exclusion Crisis (1678-1682) have been recently reconsidered by historians. These have argued for a composite scenario where politics and religious beliefs interacted in a way that recalled very closely the turbulence of the civil war years. Political allegiances shifted according to personal standings on conscience rather than the dictates of partisan politics and for once the problems whose solutions had been delayed in 1660, re-emerged, basically in relation to the questions of liberty of conscience (the toleration of assembly demanded by all dissenters) and the problems of arbitrary government (the questioning of the royal prerogative and the pre-eminence of parliament).
    We would like to argue that it was precisely this evocative power of the events (the threatening shadow of civil conflict) which justified the interest of the dramatic companies, playwrights and audiences in plays dealing with the representation of civil conflict. The individual responses of each playwright varied depending on theatrical trends and personal re-elaborations of prevalent dramatic theories rather than on their political allegiance, even when this could be openly manifested in co-textual pieces to the plays. Instead of uniformity established on political ideology, the plays that we will be considering show a varied set of dramatic responses and an equally complex set of personal visions of the conflict. Our readings of Tate’s Richard II in the light of Shakespearean re-writings, of Settle’s articulation of the Whig message in The Female Prelate, and Otway’s multi-edged representation of rebellion in the light of Hobbesian theories of the passions and the covenant (Venice Preserv’d) will attempt to cover a wide range of aesthetic, intellectual, as well as partisan responses to the Crisis on the dramatists’ part.