A comparison between two ''Storms'': Shakespeare and Dryden

3 CHAPTER I English Restoration drama I.1 The revival of theatre History teaches us that a period of stagnation, which can sometimes degenerate into a critical time and even into a reversal of the original situation, usually follows a deep socio-cultural evolution. As Guido Fornelli explains in his work La Restaurazione inglese nell‟opera di John Dryden1, periods of more flourishing literary expansion usually coincide with a conniving political rebirth, therefore the rise of great writers appears to be connected with a general social welfare. In England, Chaucer or Shakespeare during the period of emerging imperialism and John Dryden in the Restoration age are evident examples. Going back to such periods of literary expansion, Fornelli, however, adds that the gap periods, in which literature undergoes a strong slackening, are necessary to wipe the slate clean to everything which represents the past and its traditions (to which, however, the English had always been tied) and to begin a new chapter of one’s history by having a look to the new continental trends. English drama in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages had experienced its great season thanks to the theatrical companies which acted on the royal stage each time so contributing to the magnificence and cultural opening which became the main properties of the court. Less than a year later, in 1642, a Puritan edict closed theatres; that act marked the beginning of a revolutionary interval which would lead to Charles I’s beheading and to the establishment of the Puritan rule. The following twenty years after this event were full of political upsets but poor from an artistic point of view because of the petition which provided the closing of 1 Guido Fornelli, La Restaurazione inglese nell‟opera di John Dryden, Firenze, Sansoni, 1932.