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Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy
Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency
Authors:
Publisher:
2011
Summary
Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy examines the extraordinary focus on coy women in late seventeenth-century English comedy. Plays by Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Behn, Shadwell, Congreve, Trotter, Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Pix—as well as much modern scholarship about them—taint almost all feminine modesty with intimations of duplicity and illicit desire that must be contained. Forceful responses by men, therefore, are implicitly exonerated, encouraged, and eroticized. In short, characters become “women” by performing coyness, only to be mocked and punished for it.
Peggy Thompson explores the disturbing dynamic of feminine coyness and masculine control as it interacts with reaffirmations of church and king, anxiety over new wealth, and emerging interests in liberty, novelty, and marriage in late seventeenth-century England. Despite the diversity of these contexts, the plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency. This is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.
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Bibliographic data
Edition
1/2011
Copyright Year
2011
ISBN-Print
978-1-61148-372-7
ISBN-Online
978-1-61148-373-4
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
190
Product Type
Monograph
Table of contents
ChapterPages
CONTENTS No access
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No access
ABBREVIATIONS No access
CHAPTER 1. COYNESS, CONDUCT, AND SHE WOULD IF SHE COULD No access Pages 1 - 20
CHAPTER 2. FEMININE ILLUSION AND MASCULINE VIOLENCE IN WYCHERLEY’S COMEDIES No access Pages 21 - 42
CHAPTER 3. UNRULY WOMEN AND PATRIARCHAL CONTROL IN DRYDEN’S THE KIND KEEPER No access Pages 43 - 58
CHAPTER 4. COYNESS, LOVE, AND MONEY IN BEHN’S COMEDIES No access Pages 59 - 82
CHAPTER 5. LIBERTY AND COYNESS IN SHADWELL’S COMEDIES No access Pages 83 - 98
CHAPTER 6. NOVELTY AND COYNESS IN CONGREVE AND TROTTER No access Pages 99 - 116
CHAPTER 7. MARRIAGE, VIRTUE, AND COYNESS IN SOUTHERNE, VANBRUGH, AND PIX No access Pages 117 - 134
