Nathaniel Lee and the Lucretian Sublime

The Restoration dramatist Nathaniel Lee demonstrates innovation in his dramatic works by engaging philosophical ideas on atoms and chaos that he read in translations of Lucretius's De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). A friend and collaborator with John Dryden, Lee was popular with audiences but was frequently attacked by detractors, including John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, who criticized Lee's ranting style. Lee's characters, driven to extreme behaviour, feature in scenes of violent murder and suicide and offer a new kind of sublime feeling drawn from the violent Roman world that also influenced Lucretius's philosophy. Lee connects madness to political chaos and focuses most of his plays on the sublime horror of tragic spectacle. The plays set reason against the passions, and Lee looks at the political consequences of rulers unable to control their emotional outbursts and desires to communicate a new understanding of the sublime.