glory that was Rome-and Grenada, and Rhodes, and tenochtitlan: Pleasurable conquests, supernatural liaisons, and apparitional drama in interregnum entertainments, The

After President George Bush's puritanical "family values" regime but before Bill Clinton's multiculturalist monarchy, World Wrestling Federation owner Vince McMahon seized the transitional day and transformed professional wrestling from a cheap sideshow into the most popular show on cable television. Sensing the tensions incumbent on a reversal of regimes, McMahon replaced the polarized good and bad guys of the "squared circle" with uncommitted, alienated grapplers haunted by angst, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Squeaky clean heroes like Hulk Hogan and stock villains like The Iron Sheik yielded to purgatorial, psychologically unsettled souls like The Undertaker, Kane [sic], Degeneration X, and Mankind. Heeding McMahon's postmodern credo, "there is no black and white, only shades of grey," rival World Championship Wrestling likewise reworked its image, revising hero wrestler "Sting" into a greasepainted figure dressed in enigmatic black and pushing its entire stable of wrestlers beyond the couch of conventional analysis.

Recent wrestling history offers a parable for the least read, appreciated, or known drama in English literature, those few theatrical events produced in and around the Interregnum. Like the early 1990s, the Interregnum featured rapid changes of contrasting regimes and responded to uncertainty with spectacles appealing to specialized, extreme, or rowdy tastes. Contemporary critics and historians still can't figure out what attitude to take toward Cromwell's Protectorate. The "Commonwealth" seems to be a triumph of the working class and an expression of social consciousness, but it rose on religious fanaticism and condoned political repression. Those few authors or editors with the pluck to peruse this period make frequent recourse to pejorative stereotypes. Commonwealth drama, their old story goes, barely existed. What was to be seen consisted of shallow "drops," vulgar bear-baitings, and insufferable "entertainments" penned by syphilis victim emeritus William Davenant. The period is portrayed as all but devoid of art, as a time in which a few fearful Cavalier scribblers hid out in the countryside while roundheaded Precisians thumped Bibles on streetcorners.

Life on the Interregnum boards was rather more like life in Vince McMahon's postmodern arena. Censorship under Cromwell was never complete. Whenever anti-theatrical pogroms began, fights, riots, and insurgencies erupted. Players furiously defended their ramshackle stages, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Audiences never declined, not even when harsh penalties awaited those caught in the leaves. Off-off off houses like The Red Bull or The Cockpit withstood armed attack, quickly rebounding after police onslaughts; popular newspapers brazenly published satiric send-ups of the inefficacy of censorship.1 The persons inhabiting the Interregnum theater world also varied widely from historians' stereotypes. These supposedly rag-tag bands of unemployed actors were sufficiently educated and organized to present Oliver with a formal application for social welfare. Davenant himself was a cultural mixture. He emerged from a secure but not grand family, rose by wits rather than heredity, and endured intervals of exile, imprisonment, and poverty before gaining Royal favor at the Restoration.2 Davenant was never ideologically pure; following the playwright's abduction at sea off the coast of France, Puritan propagandist John Milton interceded for this most flexible of Cavaliers' life while Davenant lavished heaps of prophylactical, poetic praise on the Protector. Indeed, Davenant had just as many friends at Cromwell's court as he later cultivated among the king's companions.

Davenant's personal life was more grey than black or white. Commonwealth drama, likewise, is more subtle, rich, complex, and informative than the inevitable comparisons to Mighty Mouse or Dudley Do-Right would allow. By way of rehabilitating the mode and the era, I shall argue that those attributes that modern critics have considered most appalling-disorganization, disunity, unremitting variety, excessive spectacle, deus ex machinae, incoherence, plain old funkiness and poor execution-were essential parts of a larger experiment in an "apparitional," supernaturalistic drama. Disintegrity was an integral feature of a genre interested in relentless, extreme, and finally supernal "diversity"--iversity of the kind cultivated by Royal Society virtuosi rather than by twentieth-century affirmative action officers. Arguing for composite rather than Coleridgean form, this essay will defend "bad" or even "incompetent" drama against anachronistic conceptions of what drama should do and be. In examining such topics as profusion, variation, excess, time distortion, and scenery, I shall show that "entertainments" (an Interregnum code-word for otherwise illegal dramas) concentrated less on cartoon-style superheroes than on the reification, naturalization, and rationalization of preternaturally large or potentially absurd concepts, ideas, and events. Interregnum drama never celebrated fantasy in its own right, but affirmed that rational time and space were larger than even Baconians could imagine, that they could contain, represent, and manage all the contradictory data and experiences pouring in from changing regimes, voyages of exploration, and scientific speculations. Interregnum drama was a drama for updated Royalists who accepted such supernatural sanctions as the divine right of sovereigns but who wanted to fit their supernaturalism into the new world of science and empiricism. Their effort at stabilizing, historicizing, and preserving meta-historical quantities like glory, fame, truth, justice, and (by way of analogy) "the American Way" meant pushing reality beyond the frontiers of fiction, not fictionalizing reality.