In an era preoccupied with ideals of friendship, Swift can appear something of an outlier. This chapter focuses on the significance of Swift’s friendship with so-called ‘Scriblerians’ (principally Alexander Pope, John Gay, and John Arbuthnot). Famously, Swift cultivated a reputation for misanthropy that cut against the vaunted sociability of his time, but even in the day-to-day management of his friendships he was inclined to temper affection with reservation. Unlike Pope or Gay, Swift refuses to be drawn or to let friendship itself be drawn into a self-congratulatory mode. The chapter concludes with a sustained reading of ‘Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift’ (wr. 1731), in which friendship becomes a battle for pre-eminence, a constant source of irritation insofar as it exposes one’s own inadequacies, but is no less genuine for it.

“Gulliver has been a regular inspiration for film-makers since the earliest days of cinema. This chapter considers the various reasons for his popularity on screen and the challenges inherent in adapting Swift’s text. Among the latter are its lack of narrative unity and the discrepancies between what people think they know of the book and how it actually conducts itself. From silent French films to groundbreaking animations and Hollywood blockbusters, such concerns have always informed the kinds of Gulliver presented to the world. At the same time, each adapter of Gulliver’s Travels explicitly or implicitly considers its relevance for cinema as form and spectacle. Swift’s capacity to disorientate, both in the shifting physical proportions of his characters and in the questionable literary dignity of his text, helps to align him with the experience of cinematic audiences and innovators worldwide. When we assess not only the changing figure of Gulliver but also the different varieties of otherness encountered through his screen afterlives, we can better appreciate the adaptation process as one in which our ideas of history and literature are themselves subject to interrogation.”

This chapter examines Defoe’s various responses to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and how his published works attempt to reconcile support for James II’s removal from the throne with contempt for at least some of the event’s chief instigators. In texts such as The True-Born Englishman (1701) and Jure Divino (1706), Defoe demonstrates his ideological commitment to ‘revolution principles’ while also experimenting with awkward sympathies and rhetorical opportunities. The chapter considers Defoe’s attachment to one particularly provocative analogy between James’s downfall and Charles I’s execution, and asks to what extent he intends his readers to feel genuine pity for the exiled monarch. Ultimately, we can see in Defoe’s attitude towards 1688 the same mixture of conviction and contrarianism that typifies much of his literary career. He was greatly indebted to the Glorious Revolution in many respects, but cannot resist interrogating its motives and its consequences, fixating on the ingratitude of its other beneficiaries.

WHEN COINING the term ‘unsociable sociability’ in his ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim’ (1784), Immanuel Kant was working within a long philosophical tradition that identified human society as a site of conflicting sociable and moral impulses. To recognise resistance to sociability as a necessary quality of sociability itself was in one sense to align oneself with a strand of social thinking that emphasised the positive outcomes of apparently evil inclinations in human nature. Such an outlook had been epitomised in Britain earlier in the eighteenth century by the works of Bernard Mandeville; Kant's insistence on the value of competition for social development likewise had much in common with Adam Smith's analysis in The Wealth of Nations (1776). However, in describing the paradox of humanity's sociability – its ‘propensity to enter into society … combined with a thoroughgoing resistance that constantly threatens to break up this society’ – Kant also needed to allow for the weight of genuine altruism and virtuous instinct as a counterbalance to self-interest, and in this he was just as much an heir to the optimism of the likes of the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Frances Hutcheson. The intellectual basis for the idea of ‘unsociable sociability’ was thus variegated and contradictory, in keeping with the tensions inherent in the idea. The aim of this chapter is not to trace the tortuous etiology of Kant's concept through centuries of social philosophy, but instead to demonstrate its applicability to a trope of political writing that held particular sway in Britain of the 1730s and 1740s: the figure of the friendly enemy. I will argue through an examination of this figure's various guises and its relevance for the Patriot opposition both that it enacts the dramas of social resistance that would so fascinate Kant, and that it operates in itself as a manifestation of those dramas, a recurring point of conflict between the author's will to engage with the world and an unsocial desire for consensus and compliance. By exploring how these opposing impulses are presented and managed within texts of the time, one can gain a new appreciation of the long-standing currency of Kant's assumptions, as well as a more specific understanding of how this political movement navigated issues of sociability, dissension and individual resolve.

In 1604 the theatrical company for which Shakespeare wrote and acted was taken under the patronage of the new king; and it is becoming increasingly clear that at least two of the plays written by Shakespeare during the early years of the new reign were probably intended to reflect James I’s opinions and tastes. Othello, acted at court on 1 November 1604, seems never to have been considered in relation to Shakespeare’s new patron. I want to suggest that, like Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and possibly other plays written during these years, Othello was also designed as a work appropriate to the chief dramatist of the King’s Men.

James's various interests as a man, theological, political and scholarly, as well as his multiple roles as king—in particular his peculiar historical position as the first British king of modern times—provided panegyrists with a number of possible themes. He could be celebrated for his wisdom and learning, his piety, and his love of peace, as well as for the British unity which his accession to the English throne had achieved. Allusions could be made to his views on the theory of kingship and on witchcraft, and his own published works, Basilikon Doron and Daemonologie, could be searched for usable material.