Rogues and Role-Playing: A Social and Literary Study of Renaissance England

FAIN: FA-11246-75

Martha E. Andersen
Pomona College (Claremont, CA 91711-4434)

To study the "rogue" character and his "role-playing" in Elizabethan literature and to examine how his lateral flexibility in a world where vertical mobility was closed to him was both idealized as "freedom" within a fixed order and as a desperate play for survival in a frightening world. The study will be interdisciplinary, drawing upon contemporary role-theory in psychology and sociology as well as social history of the Elizabethan period.