‘Dramatick’ Realism: Defoe, Drama, and Jacobean City Comedy

Abstract

This article explores Defoe’s relationship with drama and his Jacobean inheritance in Moll Flanders. To explore this point, it will address the theoretical implications of Defoe’s narrative intentionalism, which furnishes him with the seemingly ambiguous role of an orator-historian. In making an allowance for ‘fiction’ as long as the truth is contained, Defoe values authorial intent over literary form, which allows him to blend a realist rhetoric with a veracious historiographic method. In accordance, it will be maintained that Defoe’s theory of fiction allows for dramatic interventions despite his well-documented anti-theatricalism. In strengthening Defoe’s much overlooked relationship with drama, it will be argued that MF derives from Jacobean city comedy a ‘dramatick’ realism and that he chooses to cloak it under novelistic truth. The conclusion will arrive at the point that the narrative coordinates of Defoe, the dramatist, are to be found in Defoe, the realist.

Keywords

• Daniel Defoe
• Moll Flanders
• realism
• drama
• Jacobean city comedy

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