Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency

Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on coy women in late seventeenth-century English comedy. These plays--as well as much modern scholarship about them--taint almost all feminine modesty with intimations of duplicity and illicit desire that must be contained. Forceful responses by men, therefore, are implicitly exonerated, encouraged, and eroticized. In short, characters become "women" by performing coyness, only to be mocked and punished for it-thus illustrating Judith Butler's point that reiterated discourse produces "the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.' Peggy Thompson explores the disturbing dynamic of feminine coyness and masculine control in forty comedies by Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Behn, Shadwell, Congreve, Trotter, Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Pix. In diverse contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency. This is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.