Dr. Morillo
English 579
Fall 08

English 579: Restoration and Early 18th-Century Drama

 Length: 5 pages, standard margins, double-spaced type
Value: 15% of final grade
Due: Friday, September 19 at my office by noon. Note that this is not a class day, so if it is inconvenient for you to come to campus on a Friday you need to get the paper in by Thurs. or Wed. of that same week.  Please submit all papers in printed out form, not as sent email files.

First Paper Topics
Pick One:

1) Choose either a single scene or one act that is especially significant to understanding one of the plays we've read, and write an analysis of why that scene or act is particularly important.  Consider details in the language and style and well as the more dramatic elements of plot, character, and matters of performance and production. You will, however, have to be selective, picking only the most interesting and provocative features of any of these elements of drama. Read the scene or act slowly, with the kind of close reading attention necessary to read a lyric poem well.

2) Choose one scene or act from any pair of our comedies thus far, The Country Wife, The Man of Mode, and The Rover, and develop a comparative argument explaining the most significant differences and/or similarities in the way your chosen playwrights approach comedy. You may wish to consider things like this: what role, if any, does the sex of each author play in their representation of a picture of manners in Restoration society? Does each author state or suggest that a comic play ought to have a moral or teach any lessons? Who wins and loses and why in each playwright's represented world? Does the play address any serious issue of note and, if so, how are they kept comic?
You will again have to be selective and the paper should not be a simple list of answers. Aim to unify the various ideas into a thesis.

3) Choose your own topic capable of sustaining a focused and interesting 5-page analysis.  Please discuss your topic with me if you do choose this option.

Guidelines
This assignment calls upon you to practice your skills in close- reading, but you may bring in other opinions from the reserve list or beyond as long as you footnote any sources in MLA style, explicate the play(s) sufficiently in your own terms, and keep other opinions subordinate to your own. You do not, however, have to consult any text beyond your chosen scene or act. You will no doubt make sense of the selection you choose in relation to the whole work from which it comes, but stay as focused as possible on the details within, not beyond, your chosen selection.

Even though close-reading skills are sometimes associated with New Critical attitudes, you are not obliged to find some ideal of harmony or unity between your passage as microcosm and the whole text, or author’s oeuvre, as macrocosm. You may wish to show how your act or scene instead reveals some interesting disruption of structure, complication of apparent theme or moral, or contradiction between apparent authorial intent and textual meaning as you understand it.

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