This fine collection of essays on Thomas Killigrew is long overdue. A major figure who straddled the Caroline and Carolean periods, Killigrew managed one of the two licensed theater companies during the Restoration, wrote several plays during the 1640s and 1650s while exiled with the Cavalier court; succeeded to the mastership of the Revels after the death of Sir Henry Herbert; and enjoyed a coveted position as a groom of the king’s bedchamber under Charles II. Despite his prominence in the second half of the seventeenth century, Killigrew has suffered from poor press in the twentieth. In 1930 Alfred Harbage penned a biography that uncovered several of Killigrew’s less savory practices, such as his proclivity for begging estates and securing monopolies, often through underhanded means. Judith Milhous’s 1979 study, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1695-1708, depicted Killigrew as a rank amateur who ran his theater company into the ground. In the 1980s and 1990s, Martin Butler, Dale Underwood, and other scholars writing about Caroline drama treated Killigrew’s plays dismissively, when they considered him at all. More recently, feminist scholars have taken Killigrew to task, especially in regard to Thomaso Parts I and II (ca. 1654), the basis for Aphra Behn’s redaction, The Rover Parts I and II (1677 and 1681). Perhaps predictably, he cannot help but fall short of her ability to interrogate patriarchal norms.

Thankfully, the essays in this collection present a more nuanced view of the man and his achievements. While the editor, Philip Major, acknowledges in an evenhanded introduction to the volume the less appetizing aspects of the Killigrew biography, he argues that exile during the Interregnum not only produced straitened circumstances, but also a consciousness of displacement, a way of explaining actions that might otherwise appear venal to modern eyes. Major enlarges the theme of exile in the final chapter to the volume, which reads The Pilgrim, written during the 1640s or 1650s, as “a reaffirmation of cavalier cultural autonomy, a demonstration to (as Killigrew saw it) the parvenu regime in England that loyalist émigrés remain outside the ambit of proscriptive domestic legislation” (186). In another fine chapter, J. P. Vander Motten similarly deploys the theme of exile to recuperate Thomaso Parts I and II, rather than seeing it as a formally damaged and ideologically suspect precursor to The Rover, as it has so often been depicted in recent feminist scholarship.

This strategy of reassessment serves other contributors as well. Chapters by Eleanor Collins and Karen Britland move beyond the standard reading of Killigrew’s plays as sycophantic, Royalist texts. By examining the distinctive features of The Prisoners and Claricilla in relation to the repertory of Queen Henrietta’s Men in the 1630s, Collins demonstrates how Killigrew’s plays contributed to the new direction being undertaken by the company, which sought both to attract attention from the court and to legitimize their drama. Britland looks at various theatrical endeavors by Thomas and his brother Henry during that same decade to “shed light on the brothers’ later behaviour and allegiances during the English civil wars” (91). Moving ahead to the Restoration, Victoria Bancroft uses The Parson’s Wedding, revived in 1664, to make a claim for Killigrew’s penchant for innovation, maintaining that its experimentation with the actor-author-audience relationship shaped the future direction of post-Interregnum comedy. David Roberts’s superbly researched chapter contests tired generalizations about Killigrew’s ineptitude as a theater manager. One can only hope that Roberts’s sharply argued essay, which is nicely complemented by Geoffrey Smith’s assessment of Killigrew’s Restoration roles and reputations, puts to rest at long last the portrait of a man motivated solely by money and caring nothing for artistic excellence or technological innovation.

One wishes the editorial staff at Ashgate had done a better job of copyediting, especially given the cost of their monographs: Marcus Nevitt’s chapter on Thomaso, for instance, exhibits consistent problems with paragraphing layout. The volume remains, nonetheless, highly recommended for anyone interested in the theatrical culture of the 1630s and the first two decades of the Restoration.