The popularity of music in Restoration Shakespeare can be explained in part by the hitherto unacknowledged circulation of Shakespeare’s songs in print and manuscript during the Interregnum. It has often been assumed that the closure of the public theatres between 1642 and 1660 and the suppression of polyphonic church music caused seventeenth-century England to lag behind Europe musically. The Interregnum has therefore been side-lined by music and theatre historians in favour of the Restoration and its stimulating theatrical revival. While the cultural restrictions of the Civil War and Commonwealth inevitably impeded new theatrical works, a survey of the literature produced during the Interregnum confirms a continued interest in drama and dramatic song. The songs from Shakespeare’s original plays reached an all-time peak in their appearance in print during the mid-seventeenth century. The Wits, or, Sport upon sport reveals that during the closure of the theatres, excerpts from pre-war plays were performed privately. The diaries of Evelyn and Pepys indicate that recreational and domestic music-making flourished, and the distinction between professional and amateur musicians developed a fluidity that would persist into the Restoration. The irrepressible enthusiasm for dramatic songs fuelled the phenomenon that would come to be known as Restoration Shakespeare.

The execution of Charles I in 1649 risked emptying the British monarchy of its magical power, yet the republic that succeeded that event witnessed a flowering of popular interest in magic as government press censorship broke down in the 1650s. Magical ideas inspired several radical religious and political figures of the Interregnum, including many who advocated the return of the Jews to England. This would result in the informal re-establishment of a Jewish community in London in 1656, a hugely significant event that marked the beginnings of tolerance of non-Christian faiths in Britain. Restored to the throne in 1660, Charles II was perhaps more eager than any previous monarch to revive the magic of monarchy, and turned the ancient ceremony of touching for the king’s evil into a major effort to project royal power as magical, as well as reviving royal patronage of astrologers and alchemists. The crises associated with the Catholic James II’s accession to the throne and his overthrow in 1688 produced numerous rumours of the political use of magic. However, it was William and Mary who became the last British monarchs to receive counsel from a practising magician, the Whig politician Goodwin Wharton, who attempted unsuccessfully to reclaim the role of John Dee in the late seventeenth century. However, the excessive use of political accusations of magic during the Civil War ensured that discourse of this kind had become associated with instability and chaos, prompting many to see the decline of witchcraft (whether real or manufactured by an adjustment of judicial policy) as a sign of God’s approval for the restored Stuart monarchy and, later, the Revolution settlement. The political drift towards disparaging rather than embracing allegations of harmful magic prepared the way for the eventual decriminalisation of magic in the eighteenth century.

This chapter describes the long, revolutionary period in which majoritarian patterns of decision-making predominated and matured but were never clearly institutionalized. The House of Commons regularly faced status-related crises that perpetuated majoritarian practices during this period, but these practices were never routinized to the point where they became devoid of profound status implications. If the ultimate question of the English Revolution is the question of why Parliament failed to protect its institutional prerogatives, this chapter provides an answer. Consensual decision-making utterly collapsed amid the disintegration of Parliament’s authority under revolutionary conditions in the later 1640s. The explosion of majoritarian dynamics undermined Parliament’s legitimacy and made its composition subject to the dictates of the army and Oliver Cromwell from the late 1640s to the end of the Interregnum. Majoritarian patterns of decision-making continued up to the Restoration, not necessarily because majority voting had become institutionalized, but because so many questions before the Commons had profound constitutional and status implications in a period of fundamental instability.

Chapter 5 explored the self-definition of the Classic Maya elite within a range of statuses, offices, ranks, and roles – marks of authority and entitlement that centred upon and radiated from a “holy” ruler. We now need to turn to how this collective noblesse went about constituting and maintaining a political community. Politics can never be reduced to a state of being since it always implies active, substantive acts that establish, maintain, and extend power relations. These acts are guided by formal and informal norms, rules, and protocols that express the structural properties of the system. To recover even an outline appreciation of these properties we must first take the textual record on offer, recognising its idealised, retrospective, and highly selective character, and then look beyond to what these tightly controlled narratives refer to only obliquely, or reveal only through statistical analysis. Very often it is the exceptions that demonstrate the rules, the anomalies and deviations that illuminate where orthodoxy gives way to exigency in a contingent world.

The third chapter traces the decline of Nasserist hegemony and the rise of a new ruling class and its project of infitah (literally translated to ‘opening’). Marking Egypt’s opening to global capital and the failure of state-led capitalist development, these years see the dominance of neoliberal restructuring and Westernization. I argue that while this ruling class did attempt to create hegemony, its project was weaker than the Nasserist project. Engaging in debates on the effects of neoliberalism in the Middle East, the chapter argues that it was this bloc that laid the foundations for Egypt’s neoliberal trajectory but failed to create a hegemonic project strong enough to maintain the same level of hegemony as the Nasser-led bloc and thus had to rely on transnational social and ideological forces in order to rule. The question of transnational capitalist development and its effects across postcolonial contexts frames this chapter, as I argue that there is a correlation between weakening hegemony and neoliberal restructuring. This era is thus understood through Fanon’s notion of a dependent bourgeoisie, as well as Gramsci’s notion of an interregnum, a period of transition.

Chapter 1 examines the early university career of Locke, detailing his proximity to Oxford Independents during the Interregnum and to more conformist figures after the Restoration. The chapter charts Locke’s possible exposure to Hobbes’s Leviathan and to debates over sovereignty and conscience that were strongly coloured by Hobbesian themes. Central to the chapter are Locke’s connection to figures such as John Owen and Henry Stubbe and early evidence of his political reading. These researches contextualize Locke’s early correspondence and his unpublished ‘Two Tracts’ and suggest the influence of Hobbes on both. The young Locke emerges as a figure versed in the new contractual theories of sovereignty and their implications for religious governance. The chapter also makes a case for deploying the categories of ‘civil’ and ‘prophetic’ religion in historical analysis of the period.