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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.
List of contents
Chapter 1 Coyness, Conduct, and She Would if She Could Chapter 2 Feminine Illusion and Masculine Violence in Wycherley's Comedies Chapter 3 Unruly Women and Patriarchal Control in Dryden's The Kind Keeper Chapter 4 Coyness, Love, and Money in Behn's Comedies Chapter 5 Liberty and Coyness in Shadwell's Comedies Chapter 6 Novelty and Coyness in Congreve and Trotter Chapter 7 Marriage, Virtue, and Coyness in Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Pix
About the author
Peggy Thompson has written on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Studies in Philology; SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900; Restoration: Studies in Literary Culture, 1660-1700; Eighteenth-Century Fiction and elsewhere. She is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College.
