Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1992

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Norman Sanders

Committee Members

James Gill, Stanton Garner, Paul Pinckney

Abstract

This study attempts to assess the ideological significance of four "split-plot" Restoration tragicomedies produced in the period of 1664-the season just before the year-long closing of the theaters again for plague-to 1671, when Dryden's production of Marriage à-la-Mode proved to be the last tragicomedy in the Fletcherian aristocratic tradition. The four plays are The Comical Revenge (1664) by Sir George Etherege; All Mistaken(1665) by Dryden's brother-in-law, James Howard; Secret Love (1667) by Dryden; and Marriage à-la-Mode . "Split-plot" plays alternated in scenes of a comic plot-involving witty and desirable aristocrats who evince a fashionable disdain for marriage even after agreeing to it-and a romantic plot depicting royalty or aristocratic families coping with destabilizing intrusions into their midst while trying to maintain a social order from the time of Charles I. The disjunctiveness of the plots in these tragicomedies has always been a critical problem. I argue that these plays employ various dialectical strategies where the comic plot reinforces the romantic plot by pretending to resist ironically the latter's affirmation of aristocratic-royalist ideology-only to give in at the resolution. My treatment of Howard's All Mistaken is the only detailed study of the play to date.

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