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

Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In 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.

Peggy Thompson has written on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Studies in Philology; SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900; Restoration: Studies in Literary Culture, 1660-1700; Eighteenth-Century Fiction and elsewhere. She is the Ellen Douglass Leyburn Professor of English at Agnes Scott College.