A case for equity: Fiction, ethics, and the origins of law in later Stuart England (John Milton, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Henry Neville)

In the later Stuart period there are few compulsions as strong as the need to account for the origins of law or to describe the foundations of civil society. My dissertation follows literary writers as they imagine those moments, mythic or actual, in which the rule of law or sovereign authority emerges from the chaotic, primitive or barbarous past. This return to origins is evident in early modern political theory, where first principles of the law and the state are recast in concrete rather than idealized terms. But it is in literary culture that this desire is most suggestive, for etiologies of law in works like Paradise Lost, The Indian Emperour, and The Isle of Pines are more than partisan historiography. Rather these accounts are where writers like Milton, Dryden, Behn, and Neville develop an innovative theory of literary fiction inspired by the concept of paideia. The key to this idea of fiction is equity. Not simply the idea of distributive fairness, equity is the flexible interpretation of law or tradition which insures that the spirit of the law is carried out to achieve justice. The political crises of the century gave English subjects the impression that equity was rapidly disappearing from public life. Tyrannical harshness, orthodox exactitude, and open vengeance were the perceived norms in government until the early eighteenth century. In response to the disappearance of equity from the political scene, the writers I study develop a politically activist theory of fiction that reinforces equity's crucial contribution to a just polity. Fiction, and in particular tragic fiction, replicates for the audience the experience of equity judgment as they consider the circumstances, intentions, and ambiguities of a tragic figure's fate under an inscrutable law. But unlike their predecessors, Restoration writers apply the pedagogy of affect to a broad public audience, distributing the emotional experience of equity judgment to broad, divided English nation. At this historical moment, literary fiction is no longer a coterie project to delight and instruct but an instrument of systematic public enlightenment which educates individual moral judgment and models proper subjecthood.