ABSTRACT

The judgment of Restoration drama as decadent––the poetry of a mannerist silver age, incapable of surpassing its Elizabethan and Jacobean precursors––remains deeply rooted in the British literary-critical tradition, so deeply rooted as to be a tacit prejudice, if not an unexamined presupposition. Few scholars dispute this fore-judgment. Fewer defend it. Consequently, critics still lack sufficient criteria by which to judge the fore-judgment itself. This study probes the most sophisticated present-day apologiae for the neoclassical or baroque dramaturgy of the Restoration. In particular, it probes the recuperations of Davenant and Dryden in the scholarship of Richard Kroll and Blair Hoxby. Testing where these recuperations (fail to) achieve cogency, it reappraises the sense that it makes to see the arc of seventeenth-century British drama as a declension narrative. The intelligibility of this narrative, it submits, hinges on the shifting criteria of mimesis that inform these playwrights’ conception of character.

摘要

对复兴戏剧的判断是颓废的——一种矫揉造作的白银时代的诗歌，无法超越其伊丽莎白时代和雅各布时代的先驱——仍然深深植根于英国文学批评传统，如果不是的话，它根深蒂固，甚至是一种默认的偏见。一个未经检验的假设。很少有学者对这种预先判断提出异议。更少捍卫它。因此，批评者仍然缺乏足够的标准来判断预判本身。这项研究探讨了当今最复杂的道歉恢复的新古典主义或巴洛克戏剧。特别是，它在 Richard Kroll 和 Blair Hoxby 的学术研究中探讨了 Davenant 和 Dryden 的康复情况。测试这些恢复（未能）在哪里获得说服力，它重新评估了将 17 世纪英国戏剧的弧线视为一种变格叙事的意义。它认为，这种叙事的可理解性取决于模仿这些剧作家角色概念的不断变化的标准。