The power of love: Ideological emotion in five seventeenth century tragedies (Elizabeth Cary, William Davenant, John Dryden, John Milton)

The dissertation argues that in seventeenth-century drama love is represented as profoundly ideological, although the ideology is often not explicit. Over the course of the century, tragedy presents us with a change in the dominant ideology of love. Dramatic love becomes strongly associated with privacy, more strongly associated with the male-female couple, and is depicted as more horizontal than hierarchical. At the beginning of the century, tragedy represents love as neither a private nor a public phenomenon, but, affected by the general cultural trend that recategorized experiences as either public or private, mid- and late-century tragedy increasingly articulates love as a phenomenon belonging to the private sphere. At the beginning of the century, tragedy emphasizes the male-male friendship couple as a primary location for love, but by the end of the century the male-female couple is more strongly emphasized. Along with the change in gender location comes a change in how male-female love was schematized: in the earlier works, male-female love is conceived of as fundamentally hierarchical, and in later works it is conceived of more horizontally, in terms of two halves making a whole. Though ideological formulations of love were not mere reflections of governmental conditions, the two phenomena were interrelated, and male-female love's new horizontal formulation in drama is connected to the disappearance of the monarch in drama and to the abatement of monarchic theory in culture at large.; This argument is advanced through readings of five plays: The Tragedy of Mariam (pub. 1613), by Elizabeth Cary; Salmacida Spolia (1639), by William Davenant; The Siege of Rhodes (1656–59), also by Davenant; Samson Agonistes (pub. 1671), by John Milton; and All for Love (1677), by John Dryden.