![]() Achaemenid Persia was convenient for exploring these questions due to its ready associations with tyranny, luxury, effeminacy and the difficulty of peaceful succession, all associations that found parallels in English domestic politics. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. ![]() ![]() While plays of Persia are interested in Persia’s status as a model of empire, the texts considered in this chapter demonstrate that Achaemenid Persia was also particularly useful to dramatists interested in exploring questions relating to domestic kingship. This volume offers precisely that: a sustained and comprehensive overview of the field of Achaemenid studies by leading scholars and experts. Like other dramatists of this period, Crowne and Cibber are scathingly critical of the court and its politics, and openly sceptical of the foundations of the monarchical system. ![]() During this time, Persia continued to be a useful background for playwrights interested in political intrigue, tyranny, rebellion and the succession of power, but in Crowne and Cibber’s plays we can observe two new developments: the heightening of an anti-Persian rhetoric, and a growing preoccupation with the decline of the Persian empire. The final chapter reads John Crowne’s Darius, King of Persia (1688) and Colley Cibber’s Xerxes (1699) against the fraught political climate of the 1680s and 1690s: the Exclusion Crisis, the ascension of James II to the throne, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the rule of William and Mary. ![]()
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