Abstract

This study of Marston's The Malcontent, Webster's The Devil's Law Case, Webster and Rowley's A Cure for a Cuckold, and Middleton and Rowley's A Fair Quarrel applies a Peircean semiotic analysis to competing discourses in seventeenth-century tragicomedy. An emerging empirical discourse, inherited from Machiavelli and explained to the Jacobeans by Sir Francis Bacon, enhanced the descriptive capacity of dramatic language, distanced these playwrights' strategies of prescription from the moral norms of Neo-Platonic humanism, and allied their work thematically with emerging economic and social-class interests of both women and men. In this alliance, empirical-humanist discourse shaped modern, Non-Plautine, tragicomic form. From these dramatists' adapting inherited aesthetic forms to a discourse problematic for drama, modern tragicomedy evolves, with its "no change" conclusions, its recourse to determinist explanation, its characters' empirically-knowledgeable strategies for eluding tragedy or recouping power, and their unstable moral and didactic rankings. This study offers ways of identifying shifting points of view in, and descriptive criteria for the use of, functionally evaluative expressions in the discourses of commerce, social gender roles, and determinist modes of explanation in seventeenth-century texts