Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1984

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Jack M. Armistead

Committee Members

Bain T. Stewart, Paul Pinckney, Allison Ensor

Abstract

Moral Design in three plays by Sir Charles Sedley--The Mulberry Garden, Antony and Cleopatra, and Bellamira; or The Mistress--allows the careful reader to discern a structural coherence and thematic unity previously unacknowledged by critics and belies the popular notion of Sedley and many of his contemporaries as frivolous, shallow, and detached from serious moral and intellectual issues. Serious issues raised by seventeenth-century social, political, and intellectual revolutions affected Sedley and his contemporaries and figure in Sedley's three plays. The Sedleys experienced the social and political upheaval of England's Civil War firsthand, and Sir Charles knew both the positive and negative implications of the so-called new philosophy through his education at Wadham College, Oxford, and through his wide readings in literature by or about modern philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Gassendi. Four elements of Sedley's moral design--skepticism, reason, a mechanical approach to life's issues, and individualism-- reflect his intellectual concerns, contribute to his logical search for truth and order, and affect the technique, and to some extent the content, of his drama. A fifth element of the design--love— belies the stereotype of predatory Hobbism attributed to Sedley and other wits, and it figures significantly in Sedley's political philosophy.

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