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The heroines in Restoration and Augustan drama traditionally have been divided into the categories of sentimental and witty, with the former quickly dismissed as shallow and unrealistic, and the latter equally dispensed with after being classifies as clever and caustic. Both types of heroines deserve more than a cursory glance, however, because they are complicated, realistic and psychologically plausible characters.The sentimental heroines have never been closely analyzed, so their roles are examined first to establish that they are both realistic and human characters. This analysis is covered in Chapter I: Indiana in The Conscious Lovers by Sir Richard Steele: A Naïve Heroine; Chapter II: Lady Easy in The Careless Husband by Colley Cibber: A Virtuous Heroine; and Chapter III: Jane Shore in The Tragedy of Jane Shore by Nicholas Rowe: A Penitent Heroine. After a summarizing and dividing chapter, a transitional heroine is introduced in Chapter V: Millwood in The London Merchant by George Lillo. Millwood bridges the gap between sentimental and witty heroines. The witty heroines are then analyzed and contrasted in Chapter VI: Harriet in The Man of Mode by George Etherege: A Witty Heroine; and Millamant in The Way of the World by William Congreve: The Ideal Heroine, in Chapter VII. The purpose of the chapters examining the witty heroines is to demonstrate that while both sentimental and witty heroines are realistic, the witty heroines are more likeable, memorable and admirable because they exhibit more positive traits.The order of the plays was chosen for two reasons. The sentimental heroines are presented first because their roles have not heretofore been examined; therefore their explication is of foremost importance. The plays are also presented in ascending order of importance, culminating in the discussion of the ideal heroine of the Restoration and Augustan dramas—Congreve’s Millamant.

La mythologie a fourni un point de départ riche en possibilités a l'écrivain dans tous les domaines littéraires et à toutes les epoques. Des dramaturges successifs ont repris et remodele les mythes qui ont été mis en scene par les anciens. Nous avons choisi, en vue de montrer l'adaptabilité et l'attrait universel du mythe, les trois grandes le-gendes d'Amphitryon, d’Oedipe et d'Antigone dans le traite-ment qui leur a été accorde à trois époques tres différentes, prenant comme base celui de l'antiquité, ensuite celui du dix-septieme siecle et finalement celui du vingtieme siecle. L'Amphitryon de Plaute a trouve echo dans celui de Moliére et l'Amphitryon 58 de Giraudoux. Sophocle avec son Oedipe montra le chemin à Corneille et à Gride pour leurs adaptations de la mime llgende. Quant à la legende d'Antigone Buripide mit en scéne le conflit des freres dans Les Pheniciennes, piece qui servit de modele à La Thébaide de Racine et c'est à Sophocle qu'Anouilh fut redevable de l'inspiration de son Antigone. Le mythe semble correspondre k un besoin profond et fondamental chez l'ecrivain. Celui-ci se trouve, comme tout homme, attiré, peut-ltre malgre lui, vers la mythologie qui, d'apres Preud et ses disciples, est une transposition des impulsions psychiques, refouilées mais présentes chez tous les etres. En outre le mythe lui offre des ressources dra-matiques pratiques en ce qu'il fournit un théme tout fait qu'il peut adapter selon ses goftts. Ainsi nous avons vu que dans le mythe d'Amphitryon Moliére vit la possibilité de développer le theme du dydoublement et d'en exploiter l'élement comique, tandisque Giraudoux s'interessa davantage a la confrontation de l'humanite et du cosmos en se vouant a la fantaisie verbale qui trouve naturellement sa place dans une telle situation. Gorneille adapta la légende d'Oedipe de faconna y inserer le theme de l'amour, tout en gar-dant 1'element legendaire de la liberty humaine mise en question par la volonte divine; aspect que Gide, humaniste a fond tourna a son avantage pour/une victoire totale a l'homme. Ce fut la présence d'une grande passion motrice qui attira Racine vers la lutte fratricide. Anouilh, par contre, opta pour Antigone, personnage ideal pour symboliser ses id!es sur le régne de l'enfance. Le dramaturge peut trouver dans le mythe une camouflage pour la representation d'un conflit d'attitudes qui lui per-met d'aborder des problémes délicats sous des exterieurs neutres. Le mythe fournit egalement une''fag.on de dormer une forme a la realite contemporaine. Mais, ambigu, le mythe apporte au dramaturge a la fois ordre et liberte puisque, tout en exercant sur l'ecrivain une certaine contrainte, il lui laisse la possibility d'eVasion dans l'adaptation. Le caractere lygendaire du mythe n'exclut pas ce qui est contem-porain a l'ecrivain qui peut, a l'aide d'anachronismes, donner a son oeuvre des aspects actuels. Le mythe, ainsi deguise nous montre des problemes qui rongent 1'auteur et, par extension, son époque. Le mythe est une sorte de défi en ce qu'il est à la fois rigide et flexible. En outre dans la mesure ou il est négation de tout ce qui est réaliste le mythe crée d'emblee entre le héros et le public une certaine distance que l'auteur est libre de diminuer ou d'augmenter selon ses buts. De cette distance ressort une impression d'élévation et d'universalité. Nous avons vu dans le mythe un moyen sur d'atteindre le plus grand public et de realiser l'unite de tous les spectateurs. En presentant au public une vieille histoire l'auteur cree et joue sur une complicity qui sert de terrain fertile pour semer de nouvelles idees; ou plutot de nouvelles facons d'envisager les mimes problemes éternels. L'écrivain, soueieux de decouvrir la clef du mystére de la creation et de 1'existence se tourne vers le mythe qui evoque les regions lointaines et nebuleuses des debuts de l'homme. L'une des principales préoccupations de l'écrivain de tous les siécles n'a-t-elle pas été, n'est-elle pas toujours de s'interroger sur le sens de la vie? II a trouvé dans la mythologie une fagon symbolique d'atteindre ce but. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

The subject of medicine in the works of Moliere has been traditionally treated as a matter of satire. While it is important to consider this view and while biographical approaches relating Moliere's personal illness to the content of his medical comedy are illuminating, this study proposes that a plurality of views offers a more complete picture. Such analysis discovers that Moliere's medical comedy is much more than satire, that it contains elements of black humor and even approaches the theater of cruelty in its treatment of sickness and death. The metaphor in this approach is in the perception of a composite image of this part of Moliere's theater, much like the pattern that a kaleidoscope discloses. As we may sort out the various elements that compose the kaleidoscopic impression--light and shadow, color, form, change of image through manipulation of the instrument--there is a similarity in the division of elements in Moliere's medical theater. Light and shadow correspond to the opposition of fact and fantasy in seventeenth-century French medicine and constitute the historical view of his work; color corresponds to the notion of Galenic humor theory and suggests that the comedy of character may be analyzed according to humoral temperaments; form corresponds to the language Moliere used in his medical plays; the change of image occurs in Moliere with the passage of time--his medical comedy being farcical at the beginning of his career and much darker towards the end of his life. The purpose of this approach is to identify these separate elements in order to better understand their function as an organic whole. For this reason, the notion of organic unity is also treated. In an effort to relate Moliere's theater to the present day, this study compares Moliere's work with Artaud's notion of the nature and function of theater, with the two meanings of semiology--sign theory and symptomatology, and using an archetypal approach, concludes with the suggestion that sexuality, death, and medicine form a hidden mythology in these plays.

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The thesis continues the work undertaken in recent years by (in alphabetical order) James J. Marino, Scott McMillin, Paul Menzer, Simon Palfrey, Tiffany Stern, Evelyn Tribble, and others to put to use what is now known about the purpose, distribution, and usage of early modern actors' parts. The thesis applies the new methodology of reading 'in parts', or reconstituting early modern plays 'in parts', to the body of plays written by Ben Jonson. The aim of the project is to offer a reconsideration of Jonson as a man of theatre, interested not only in the presentation of his works in print, but also in their production at the Globe and at Blackfriars. By reconstructing and examining the parts through which the actors performing in Jonson's plays accessed their characters, the thesis proposes answers to the questions: how can we read and analyse Jonson's plays differently when looking at them in terms of actors' parts; did Jonson write with parts in mind; what did Jonsonian parts have to offer actors by way of challenge and guidance; what can we learn from parts about Jonson's assumptions and demands with regard to the actors; and how did actors themselves respond to those demands. These questions are significant because they engage critically with the tradition of seeing Jonson as a playwright dismissive of actors and distrustful of the theatre; they seek to establish a perspective that allows us to assess Jonson's abilities to instruct and challenge his actors through staging documents. More generally, the research contributes to the studies of the early modern rehearsal and staging practices and invites consideration of Shakespeare's part-writing techniques in contrast with those of his major rival. With no surviving early modern parts from Jonson's plays (indeed with only a handful of surviving parts from the period), the first task is to determine the level of accuracy with which the parts can be reconstructed from Jonson's printed plays. Stephen Orgel was by no means the first critic who used the example of Sejanus to assert that Jonson habitually doctored his plays before they were published, but his view has become a critical commonplace. This thesis re-examines the case of Jonson's revisions and concludes that, far from being representative, the 1605 Sejanus quarto is an anomaly which Jonson himself needed to account for in his address to the reader. It is true that Jonson cultivated a distinct style of presentation of printed material, but the evidence that he extensively tampered with the texts themselves after they were performed is scarce (again, the revisions found in the Folio versions of Every Man in His Humour and Cynthia's Revels are addressed and found to be exceptional, rather than typical), while the evidence of his pride in the original compositions and performances is much stronger. Since such enhancements as dedicatory poems, arguments (i.e. plot summaries), character sketches, or marginalia have no bearing on the shapes of actor's parts, they do not in any way compromise the reliability of the printed texts as sources from which Jonson's parts can, argues the thesis, be reconstructed with reasonable accuracy. Jonson, himself an actor and apparently a friend and admirer of a number of great actors of his age (Edward Alleyn, Nathan Field, Richard Robinson, Salomon Pavy, Richard Burbage), knew from personal experience how much depended on actors mastering, or, in their terminology, being 'perfect' in, their parts. By granting the actor access only to select portions of the complete play-text (i.e. his own lines and cues), the part effectively regulated the performance in cases when the actor had only limited knowledge of the rest of the play. Such cases seem to have been very common: documentary evidence suggests that actors had to learn their parts on their own over the course of a few weeks, and only then attended group rehearsals, most of which were concerned with 'business', not text which had already been learned. While some might have attended a reading of the play (if one was arranged for the benefit of the sharers, for instance), or gained more information about the play from their fellow actors, the parts remained their chief means of internalising their text and acquiring a sense of the play they were in. Jonson, who was not a resident playwright with any company performing in London and thus probably did not always have easy and regular access to the actors, could sometimes have taken advantage of the actors' dependence on their parts and crafted the parts as a means of exercising control over the performances of his plays. Building on this premise, the thesis examines various features of actors' parts that would have made a difference to an actor's performance. It draws on recent advancements in the studies of textual cohesion (linguistic features such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, etc.) to point out how the high and low frequency of cohesive ties (pairs of cohesively related words or phrases) in various sections of the part would have given an actor a good idea of how prominent his part was at any given moment. It examines Jonson's use of cues and patterns of cueing: like Shakespeare, Jonson was fond of using repeated cues to open up a space for improvisation, and he seems to have been aware of the need to provide the apprentices in the company with parts cued by a limited number of actors so as to allow for easier private rehearsals with their masters. The thesis also examines the common feature of Jonson's 'split jokes' - jokes that are divided across multiple parts - and asks whether any kind of comic effect can be achieved by excluding the punch line of a joke from the part that contains its setup, and the setup from the part that delivers the punch line, offering a fresh look at the nature of early modern comedy. In structural terms, the thesis considers how a narrative constituted solely by the lines present on an actor's part can diverge from the narrative of the play as a whole and how an understanding of a play as a text composed of actors' parts, as well as of acts and scenes, can help to refine arguments about Jonson's assumptions about the strengths of the companies for which he wrote. What emerges is an image of Jonson who, far from concerned only with readership, consciously developed a brand of comedy that was uniquely suited to, perhaps even relying on, the solipsistic manner in which the actors received and learned their parts.

This thesis has two aims: to make an original contribution to knowledge by demonstrating the importance of theatrical rivalry to the development of drama in the Carolean period (the reign of Charles II), and to re-evaluate the managerial career of Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683). This is the first detailed survey of the circumstances in which the King's Company and the Duke's Company competed and an analysis of the troupes' devices of plotting and counter-plotting during their twenty-two years of stage rivalry from 1660 to 1682. As well as charting the stage rivalry between the two companies, my dissertation argues that Killigrew was a competent but unscrupulous and devious playhouse-manager. A close analysis of his managerial career will show how Thomas Killigrew was the central figure in the Carolean stage rivalry in London and how he helped to shape the future of English theatre. The survey starts from Killigrew's beginnings as the manager of the King's Company from 1660 and concludes in 1682 when the King's Company was effectively taken over by its rival, the Duke's Company, to make one United Company, thus ending the span of theatrical competition in the Carolean period. Each chapter is divided in accordance with the beginning and end of significant events of rivalry and are organised chronologically at different phases of the competition. The first chapter provides the historical background of the establishment of the patent grants and the gradual consolidation of the monopoly over dramatic entertainment in London. In charting the initial stages of the development of the King's Company and the Duke's Company from 1660 to 1663, this chapter argues that it was largely due to Thomas Killigrew's underhandedness that the King's Company began the competition in an advantageous position. The second chapter focuses on the theatrical competition from 1663 to 1668. Until 1663 both companies were busy consolidating their duopoly and the competition between the two managers ended abruptly with William Davenant's death in 1668. In the survey of the Killigrew-Davenant rivalry, this chapter's overall aim is to argue for narrowing of the wide chasm often described between the managerial skills of the two managers. Chapter three explores the period from when Mary Davenant, Thomas Betterton and Henry Harris took over the management of the Duke's Company to the burning of the King's Company's playhouse in 1672. It argues that the competition in this period was evenly matched. This chapter also revises the perceived style of management adopted by both Betterton and Killigrew. The chapter argues that Betterton was perhaps less involved in the most audacious project of the Duke's Company during these years: the building of three theatres including the Dorset Garden Theatre. In the case of the latter, this chapter argues that Killigrew continually took risks at other people's expense and was little concerned with the well being of his staff and shareholders as long as the company gained notoriety and retained its success. The penultimate chapter of the dissertation covers the time span from the Bridges Street Theatre's fire to the ousting of Killigrew as the manager by his own son, Charles Killigrew. It argues that this was the crucial period in which the Duke's Company began clearly to surpass its rival. This chapter qualifies the orthodox view that the King's Company simply lost its battle against the Duke's Company by demonstrating that the two companies also had to contend with a large number of foreign troupes and the rising popularity of music concerts. The final chapter explores the period from when Charles Killigrew took over the management of the King's Company to the amalgamation of the two acting troupes in 1682. It demonstrates the negative effects of the political turbulence of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis on both the troupes' plays and players. The chapter also argues that Charles Killigrew was not as charismatic or manipulative as his father, and that he greatly contributed to the demise of the King's Company. In conclusion, this is strictly a study of theatre history that looks at the importance of management and company rivalry to the development of Carolean drama. At its peak in the 1670s, the Carolean period produced on average twenty new plays per season. The highly competitive nature of the rivalry between the King's Company and the Duke's Company and how the respective managements responded to the success or the failure of the other theatre is the background against which one must read the plays of the Carolean period. Thomas Killigrew, whose managerial career spanned the longest in the Carolean years, was an influential figure in the period and whose innovations and difficulties as a manager had a direct effect not only on theatre history but also on the dramatic traditions of the seventeenth century.

Whereas scholarly malcontents and naifs in late Renaissance drama represent the actual notion of university graduates during the time period, scholarly tricksters have an obscure social origin. Moreover, their lack of motive in participating in the plays' events, their ambivalent value structures, and their conflicting dramatic roles as tricksters, reformers, justices, and heroes pose a serious diffculty to literary critics who attempt to define them. By examining the Western dramatic tradition, this study first proposes that the scholarly tricksters have their origins in both the Vice in early Tudor plays and the witty slave in classical comedy. By incorporating historical, cultural, anthropological, and psychological studies, this essay also demonstrates that the scholarly tricksters are each a Jacobean version of the archetypal trickster, who is usually associated with solitary habits, motiveless intrusion, and a double function as selfish buffoon and cultural hero. Finally, this study shows that their ambivalent value structures reflect the nature of rhetorical training in Renaissance schools.

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