The fate of character in Dryden's theatre of passion

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.