RADICAL INDIVIDUALISM IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA (RENAISSANCE, RESTORATION, ENGLAND)

This study explores the relationship between two groups of radically individualistic characters in English drama: the tragic villains of the late Renaissance (1590-1635) and the comic heroes of the late seventeenth century (1670-1700). Because the radical individualist acknowledges no restrictions on his behavior other than those he self-interestedly imposes on himself, he forces his society (or drama) implicitly at least to define and justify its strictures on individual action. Plays containing radically individualistic characters therefore reveal cultural and authorial assumptions about human nature, social obligation, and moral law. More particularly, the comparison of selected Renaissance and Restoration plays containing such characters illuminates the commonly acknowledged shift in the seventeenth century from belief in a transcendent reality, which was the source and authority of restrictions on individual action, to increased acceptance of a totally material reality entailing no such restrictions.;Chapter I compares Shakespeare's Richard III (1592) and Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676) and the contrasting assumptions about individual power and social obligation that they imply. Chapter II examines the contrasting attitudes toward the passions embodied in Middleton's and Rowley's The Changeling (1623) and Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675), two plays that identify their central characters as satanic seducers. Chapter III compares Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633) and Dryden's Love Triumphant (1694) as they imply contrasting responses to the questions about human nature and moral law that their incestuous protagonists raise. Chapter IV analyzes the concepts of personal identity presupposed in two plays dramatizing radically individualistic societies, Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607) and Southerne's The Wives' Excuse (1692). Each comparison offers a fresh perspective on the shift from theological to materialistic assumptions, because each play presents ideas as they are presupposed by and affect particular human experience.