The most important political occurrence in England in the first decade of the eighteenth century is the establishment of a standing army during the War of the Spanish Succession, for the theatre is dominated by anxiety which can be traced to the growing cultural presence of the military in society. This dissertation is a cultural history of the theatre of the early eighteenth century, focusing on the comedies of Farquhar, Steele, Burnaby, Baker, Centlivre, and others. I emphasize social relationships and theoretical constructions of gender, class, and the human body rather than aesthetics and form, and I contend that military transformations leave an indubitable cultural impression in English society and on the stage Chapter One establishes historically the state's monopolization of physical force and argues that the comedies reveal a 'civilizing process' wherein the individual is forced to restrain his affects and that the feudal warrior is thereby transformed into a courtly nobleman or gentleman. Chapter Two shows how the comedies are dominated by an epistemology of a mechanized body, the theory of which I trace to the institutionalization of power and discipline in the standing army; the observation of mechanical principles at work in the human body leads dramatists to challenge the idea of a 'natural' or essentialized human behavior. In Chapter Three, I examine how the rise of nationalism in an age dominated by war and international trade creates anxiety about male gender identity; dramatists discover that masculinity is conceptually unstable and performative, an essentialized identity being a fiction constructed by class-based cultures competing for dominance. In Chapter Four, I explore the struggle for cultural capital between the discourses of aristocratic hegemony and emerging bourgeois self-assertions; having established that behavior is performative, the comedies show the intensity of social imitation, affectation, and anxiety. Chapter Five gathers the ideas of the foregoing chapters into a reading of The Recruiting Officer, the most popular comedy of the century. Focusing on specific transformations in military culture and technology, I show how Farquhar captures and disarms the competing cultural anxieties of his age yet manages to create a living play that has cultural reverberations even today / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_25138 |
| Date | January 1992 |
| Contributors | Gardner, Kevin Jay (Author), Roach, Joseph R (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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