Revenge on the English stage has long been associated with Elizabethan and Renaissance revenge tragedies, and has been all but ignored in Restoration theater history. While the shortage of scholarly work on revenge in Restoration drama might seem to indicate that revenge is not a vital part of Restoration drama, I argue that revenge on stage in the Restoration is connected with important late seventeenth-century anxieties about monarchy and political subjecthood in the period. This dissertation examines how Restoration tragic drama staged during Charles II’s reign (1660-1685) depicts revenge as a representation of an unrestrained passion that contributes to the ‘seditious roaring of a troubled nation’ of which Thomas Hobbes writes in Leviathan. This dissertation suggests that we need to assess Restoration tragic drama’s employment of acts of vengeance in order to better understand how tragic drama of the period narrates crises of kinship, kingship, and political subjecthood. In chapters addressing blood revenge, rape, female passion, and personal ambition, I examine revenge in a number of Restoration tragic dramas written for the stage between 1660 and 1685. This project shows that characters’ claims to redress wrongs committed against the civil notion of justice collapse into private, individual desires that are pathological and destructive of the state. This project on revenge has the potential to shape the way we think about revenge on stage by calling attention to revenge as a sign of self-interest at the end of the seventeenth century, an age in which a shift in thinking about monarchy and personhood was taking place. Just as Hobbes warns against the “excessive desire of Revenge,” this dissertation shows how playwrights stage revenge as a warning about the potentially destructive consequences of revenge: revenge puts not only private bodies in danger but also the public well being of the state.

Oscar Wilde redefined the relationship between Life and Art, and attempted to live in the style of the characters in his works: pursuing Beauty. His view of Life as imitating Art played a crucial role in his definition of Individualism. In his works, he explored how one develops one's personality and Individuality, and society's role in suppressing the Individual. He firmly believed that Life and ugliness were inextricably intertwined, and that society's moral structure was to blame. Popular in his time as an artist, he made it a point in his writing and in his work to stand apart from society. Ultimately, society cast him out; while in prison, he experienced an aspect of Life that he had been avoiding his entire life as an aesthete, and thus altered and expanded his ideal of the Individual. In falling from grace and in being forced to live in the ugliest of realities, he developed a fuller idea of what it means to live beautifully.

In these novels, Woolf demonstrates the ways in which wartime trauma affects post-war life, from the societal trauma of losing an entire generation in Jacob’s Room, to the continuation of wartime beyond the end of the war for traumatized soldiers and anyone whose lives they touch in Mrs. Dalloway, to recovery through the creation of art and family ties in To the Lighthouse, to the question of futurity inherent in wartime trauma in The Years.

Characters’ identities are integral to how audiences relate to them. But what happens when the character suddenly alters his or her outward appearance? Are they still the same person? This thesis seeks to argue that disguise does not alter a character’s true nature, as evidenced by Pyrocles in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and the Prince in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure. Both Pyrocles’ suit of Philoclea and the Prince’s suit of Lady Happy are successful because, however subversive they appear at first, they ultimately adhere to societal norms of the time. The relationship between the cross-dressed prince and his love interest in both works only appears to subvert heteronormative expectations for the time, but ultimately adheres to these societal norms once the disguised character’s true identity is revealed to his chosen partner.

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The purpose of this thesis is to outline a new understanding of the relationship between England’s Queen Elizabeth I and her favorite courtier, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. This new understanding proposes that their childhood experiences and education were fundamental to their relationship as adults. They learned their manipulative abilities as a key to survival early in their lives, and repeatedly manifested this pattern throughout the years, as willing participants in a sexual and artistic game lasting only as long as both players followed the rules. The highpoint of this union was reached during the summer of 1575 when Leicester entertained Elizabeth at his palatial country house, Kenilworth. Critical interpretation and a multidisciplinary research approach, including history, child psychology, architecture, and literature, provide significant proof that Elizabeth and Leicester sexually manipulated each other in order to survive the turbulence of sixteenth century England.