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

Yıl 2025, Sayı: 41, 61 - 78, 19.11.2025

Selena Özbaş

https://doi.org/10.26650/jtcd.1646187

Öz

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.

Anahtar Kelimeler

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

Kaynakça

• Anonymous. Hic Mulier: Or, The Man^Woman and Haec^Vir: Or, The Womanish^Man. University of Exeter, 1973. google scholar
• Beattie, James. “Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783).” In Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage. Edited by Pat Rogers, 59-60. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. google scholar
• Bellhouse, Mary L. “On Understanding Rousseau’s Praise of Robinson Crusoe.” Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory/Revue canadienne de théorie politique et sociale 6, no.3 (1982): 120-137. google scholar
• Cicero. De Oratore. Translated by E.W. Sutton. The Loeb Classical Library. London and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. google scholar
• Collier, Jeremy. A Short View of The Immorality and Profaneness of The English Stage. München: Wilhelm Fink, 1967. google scholar
• Damrosch, Leopold. “Defoe as Ambiguous Impersonator.” Modern Philology 71, no.2 (1973): 153-159. google scholar
• Davis, L. J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of The English Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. google scholar
• Defoe, Daniel. An Essay upon Literature. London: Tho. Bowles, 1726. google scholar
• –. “Defoe to Robert Harley, August-September 1704?.” In The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe. Edited by Nicholas Seager, 85-94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. google scholar
• –. “Review, Vol. IV, Numb. 73, July 31 1707.” In Defoe’s Review. Edited by Arthur Wellesley Secord, 289-92. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1965. google scholar
• –. Roxana. Edited by John Mullan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996: 2008. google scholar
• –. The Complete English Tradesman. Vol.1. 2nd ed. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969. google scholar
• –. The Storm. Edited by Richard Hamblyn. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. google scholar
• Dionne, Craig. “Fashioning Outlaws: The Early Modern Rogue and Urban Culture.” In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, 33-61. google scholar
• Edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007. google scholar
• Dionne, Craig and Steve Mentz. “Introduction: Rogues and Early Modern English Culture.” In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Edited by Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz, 1-32. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007. google scholar
• Gibbons, Brian. Jacobean City Comedy. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. google scholar
• Janko, Richard. Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a reconstruction of Poetics II. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. google scholar
• Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker. “The Roaring Girl (1611).” In The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama. Edited by Simon Barker and Hilary Hinds, 327-377. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. google scholar
• Minto, William. Daniel Defoe. London: Macmillan and Co., 1879. google scholar
• Moore, John Robert. “Defoe and Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1968): 71-80. google scholar
• Neidleman, Jason. Rousseau’s Ethics of Truth: A Sublime Science of Simple Souls. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. google scholar
• Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001: 2003. google scholar
• –. “Defoe’s Theory of Fiction.” Studies in Philology 61, no.4 (1964): 650-668. google scholar
• –. “Defoe and the Disordered City.” PMLA 92, no.2 (1977): 241-252. google scholar
• –. “Picturing the Thing Itself, or Not: Defoe, Painting, Prose Fiction, and the Arts of Describing.” Eighteenth^Century Fiction 9, no.1 (1996): 1-20. google scholar
• –. Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe’s Fiction. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. google scholar
• Oergel, Maike. Zeitgeist—How Ideas Travel: Politics, Culture, and the Public in the Age of Revolution. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019. google scholar
• Orgel, Stephen. “The Sub-texts of The Roaring Girl.” In Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. Edited by Susan Zimmerman, 9-20. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. google scholar
• Ozbas, Selena. “Swift’s Alberti? The Geometrical Comedy of Gulliver’s Travels.” IDEAS: Journal of English Literary Studies 4, no.2 (2024): 43-57. google scholar
• Prynne, William. Histrio^mastix, The Players Scourge. London: E.A. and W.I., Michael Sparke, 1633. google scholar
• Richetti, John. “Defoe as narrative innovator.” In The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. Edited by John Richetti, 121-138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. google scholar
• Roche, Kennedy F. Rousseau: Stoic and Romantic. London and New York: Routledge, 1974: 2019. google scholar
• Ross, John Frederick. Swift and Defoe: A Study in Relationship. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1941. google scholar
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or on Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. Basic Books, 1979. google scholar
• Seager, Nicholas. The Cambridge Edition of The Correspondence of Daniel Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. google scholar
• –. “A Romance the likest to Truth that I ever read”: History, Fiction, and Politics in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier.” Eighteenth^Century Fiction 20, no.4 (2008): 479-505. google scholar
• Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. google scholar
• Shapiro, Barbara J. A Culture of Fact: England, 1550^1720. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000. google scholar
• Shaw, Narelle L. “Ancients and Moderns in Defoe’s Consolidator.” Studies in English Literature, 1500^1900. 28, no3 (1988): 391-400. google scholar
• Scott, Walter. “The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart.” In Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage. Edited by Pat Rogers, 66-79. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. google scholar
• Swift, Jonathan. “A Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test.” In Daniel Defoe: The Critical Heritage. Edited by Pat Rogers, 38. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. google scholar
• Terence. The Comedies. Translated by Peter Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. google scholar
• Thomas, Douglas R. Cicero’s Brutus: Edition, Textual Commentary, and Study of the Transmission. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. google scholar
• Wall, Cynthia. “Defoe and Drama.” In The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe. Edited by Nicholas Seager and J.A. Downie, 69-90. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. google scholar
• Watson, Matthew. “Rousseau’s Crusoe myth: the unlikely provenance of the neoclassical homo economicus.” The Journal of Cultural Economy 10, no.1 (2017): 81-96. DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2016.1233903. google scholar
• Watt, Ian. The Rise of The Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957. google scholar
• Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. Vol.1 London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. google scholar
• Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and The Realist Novel. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. google scholar