---

The same principle underlies the movement of the average Restoration comedy, The Man of Mode, for example. Comparing love to eating or fighting or poaching simply leaves the invisible values out in favor of the visible physical qualities. Science, in the seventeenth as in later centuries, laid the way for literary naturalism. That is, science took its first steps by separating moral and theological values from the quantitative facts of stars or falling bodies or chemical reactions. The Restoration playwright, no less than Zola or Dreiser, imitated his scientific contemporaries. In an Elizabethan or Jacobean play, whether tragedy or comedy, the language expands the action outward through the analogical correspondences of the Renaissance world-picture to a cosmic implication.
The action on the stage is projected onto a supernatural "stage behind the stage. In Restoration tragedy the action is reflected back into the individual psyche. Dramatic action becomes a dialogue of the mind with itself. Any reality other than the mere physical facts or appearances had to be relegated to the invisible, uncertain realm of value. A far cry it was from the Elizabethan sense of the coexistence of fact and value. To the Elizabethans, the character who announced his freedom from connection with the supernatural or from his "natural" obligations to king or family or community was a villain.

I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran. These characters have the same sense of experimenting with their new maturity that college freshmen have when first away from home. They have, too, a sense of the special quality of their age, of the newness of their isolation. It is this sense, I think, that underlies the contemptuous laughter at older people who tried to apply older standards, like Mrs. Caution or Major Oldfox. It is the basis, too, for the continual local jokes, as though playwrights and characters alike wanted to insist, "I am of this age.
I am of this age. As one seventeenth-century writer, Sir Thomas Browne, put it, "Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds. Out of the sense of appearance divorced from nature, in scholastic terms, form severed from being, or in the terms of the new science, secondary qualities separated from primary, comes the interest in dissimulation and the idealization of candor. From an attempt to see physical reality stripped of any dressing-up comes the "conversion down. The business you have now on your hands is to be spun out in length and not to be ended at once. Thus, Wycherley in his nondramatic writings refers constantly to the belief that there is a complex of ideas, love, poetry, and religion, all forms of the irrational, which should be kept separate from ordinary reason.

Click here for more info!
Or visit our site >> sample nursing research paper

More info about:
essays wuthering heights
what is analytical research
term paper idea
how to write a movie review essay
electrical engineering papers
purchase essays online
free essay writing
custom reports