The purpose of this thesis is to make further contribution in filling the gap in detailed analyses of George Farquhar's plays.

ABSTRACT "Music for the Mad: A study of the madness in Purcell's mad songs" Ester Lebedinski, Uppsala University, Sweden, Department of Musicology, 2009. Madness was a stock topic in seventeenth-century drama, and music a compulsory feature on the Restoration stage. Henry Purcell's contributions to the latter are abundant, and include the popular combination of madness and music in his mad songs for Thomas Durfey's comedies. This essay aims at exploring the depiction of madness through music, verbal text and dramatic context in Purcell's mad songs for Durfey's plays A Fool's Preferment (1688), The Richmond Heiress (1693) and part I and III of The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694 and 1696 re­spectively). Particular emphasis is laid on text illustration and the songs' placement in the dramatic context. Madness is discussed as a deviation from the accepted norm, as the anormal demarcated from the normal. Conclusively, Purcell's mad songs are characterized by their variousness e.g. rapid changes between keys, styles, moods and subject matters, as opposed to the relative conti­nuousness of songs not depicting madness, and their sometimes exaggerated word paintings. Purcell's music does not independently express madness, but the illustration of madness is linked to the verbal text and the dramatic context, highlighted and completed through Pur­cell's music.

This dissertation shows that early modern female playwrights were shaped by and helped to shape commercial literary marketplaces that were increasingly affected by the rise of credit, shifting exchange values, and unstable notions of trust, interest, and economic motivation. By looking at how their plays appropriated and responded to financial language present in popular forms of publications such as pamphlets, ballads, and accounting guidebooks, we find that female playwrights understood the discourse of credit in ways that were particularly important for female readers and theatergoers and employed it in their writing for the stage. My study illustrates how their plays represent credit as always inherently tied to the potential risk involved in the “business” of being a woman on the marriage market, a mother with a fortune to pass on, or a widow with a business to maintain. In this project, I analyze the city comedies of Aphra Behn, the pseudonymous Ariadne, Mary Pix, and Susanna Centlivre and conclude that their works constitute a narrative bridge between the financial discourse that appears before them in conduct books and advice manuals of the Restoration and after them in the eighteenth-century novel. Making these women and their London comedies a focal point, we can see how they employed the period’s financial discourse to highlight the problems associated with broken promises, counterfeit wills, and the supposed power of contract. My research demonstrates how these playwrights and their works play a critical role in accounting for the trajectory of financial discourse in eighteenth-century culture and literature prior to the “birth” of the English novel. “Risky Business” moves beyond a discussion of female investors or money in literature and, instead, offers a more nuanced understanding of the ways women writers were impacted by the rise of paper credit outside of and prior to fiction. The research presented in this project offers a new account of the way early modern female readers, writers, and theatergoers, were influenced by an increasingly complex financial discourse, a more detailed understanding of the relationship between economic and literary history, and a new way of conceptualizing the commercial female playwright.

The comedies of John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell, and Aphra Behn were equally well-received by Restoration audiences, yet each dramatist professes divergent dramatic theories and poetic goals. In prefatory material to their plays, Shadwell insists a dramatist’s duty is to depict virtue rewarded and vice punished, Behn rejects the idea that comic drama might influence morals or manners, and Dryden maintains that his only goal is to please the audience, despite his dull conversation and lack of wit. A comparison between the playwrights’ dramatic theory and their most popular comedies of the 1668-77 decade indicates that none of them represent with any accuracy their own (or others’) work. Shadwell abandons his didactic goals in pursuit of approbation and income, while Behn unswervingly attacks social issues prevalent in a patriarchal society. Dryden’s comedies—witty and fast-paced despite his protestations—also address weaknesses in the patriarchal system and condemn the commodification of marriage.