Dorimant. I remember, there was a mask observed me, indeed. ‘Fooled,’ did she say?

Orange-Woman. Aye, I vow she told me twenty things you said, too, and acted with her head and with her body so like you— (1.1.65-69)

Orange-Woman. “Good—now we shall have it! You did but want him to help you. Come, pay me for my fruit.” (1.1.74-78).

Dorimant. [To his manservant Handy] Leave your unnecessary fiddling. A wasp that’s buzzing about a man’s nose at dinner is not more troublesome than thou art.

Handy. You love to have your clothes hang just, sir.

Dorimant. I love to be well-dressed, sir, and think it no scandal to my understanding.

Handy. Will you use the essence or orange-flower water?
….
Dorimant. That a man’s excellency should lie in neatly tying of a ribbon or a cravat! (1.1.338-369)

Another example of challenges to self-possession, when a version of oneself is seen in the Other: recall in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, or The Banish’d Cavaliers (1677), how the bankrupt Willmore, who declares that he would not sell himself, is rebuked by the famous courtesan Angellica Bianca: “tell me, sir, are not you guilty of the same mercenary crime? When a lady is proposed to you for a wife, you never ask how fair, discreet, or virtuous she is, but what her fortune” (2.2.98-101). Suddenly Willmore is invited to view himself prostituting his honor to his purse.

Emilia. “However you despise him, gentleman, I’ll lay my life he passes for a wit with many” (3.272-273).

Lady Squeamish. . . . See, see, how wildly he [Valentine] looks. For Heaven’s sake have a care of him. I fear he is distempered in his mind. . . .

Saunter. Poor Ned Valentine! Lord, how sillily he looks!

Caper. Aye, and would fain be angry if he knew but how. (2.413-427)

Lady Squeamish. “Lord, Mr. Goodvile, what ails you? This was an unexpected adventure. But let, let me die, it is very pleasant. Ha, ha, ha.” (4.135-137).

Malagene. “Why, how now Frank, what a pox, out of humor?—Why madam, what have you done to him, what have you done to him madam? Lord, how he looks!—Why Frank I say, prithee bear up. . . .

Goodvile. How am I continually plagued with rogues and owls! I’ll set my house o’fire rather than have it haunted and pestered by such vermin.

Malagene. “Faith, Frank, do. I have not seen a house o’fire this great while. It would be a pretty frolic. Prithee, let us about it presently” (4.195-209)

Shortly after, Goodvile himself behaves like a cast mistress—mistaking his own masked wife as Victoria, he laments “Was mine a passion to be thus abused? I who have given you all my heart! Perfidious false woman! “

Truman. “the daubing was too coarse, and the artificial face appeared too plain” (4.273-274).

Goodvile. “Now, if I am not a cuckold, let any honest wittol judge. Ha, ha, ha. How it pleases me. Blood! Fire! and Daggers!” (5.46-48).

Quotes from Otway’s The Soldiers’ Fortune (1680)

SIR JOLLY [to Beaugard]  “My hero! My darling! My Ganymede! Strong! Wanton! Lusty! Rampant! Ha, ah, ah! . . . . here’s a leg! Qua-a-a-a-a! (1.1.210-214)
SIR JOLLY [to Courtine] “ah toa-a-a-ad!” (1.1.220)

SIR JOLLY “I am a poor old fellow, decayed and done” (1.1.233).

SIR JOLLY “I’ll pimp for thee, dear heart. And shan’t I hold the door? Shan’t I peep, ha?” (1.1.247-248).

SIR JOLLY [to whores Mally and Jenny] “What, nobody tickle me! Nobody tickle me?” (1.1.327).

LADY DUNCE [speaking of her husband SIR DAVY] “though he has other divertissements that take him of from my enjoyment, which make him so loathsome no woman but must hate him” (1.2.31-33).

SIR JOLLY [to Beaugard] “if thou hadst her in thy arms now between a pair of sheets, and I under the bed to see fair play, boy, Gemini, what would become of me? What would become of me? . . . . a small, glimmering lamp, just enough for me to steal a peep by” (2.1.25-35).

BEAUGARD [who doesn’t realize that Lady Dunce is manipulating Sir Davy to be a go-between with Beaugard, by appearing to disclose to Sir Davy, Beaugard’s own overtures to her] “To be so sordid a jilt, to betray me to such a beast as that! Can she have any good thoughts of such a swine? Damn her!” (2.1.195-197).

BEAUGARD. “he got enough , at the king’s return to secure himself in the general pardon. . . . Thus forgiven, thus raised, and made thus happy, the ungrateful slave disowns the hand that healed him, cherishes factions to affront his master, and once more would rebel against the head which so lately saved his from a pole” (2.1.355-363).

BEAUGARD “A plague on all pimps, I say! A man’s business never thrives so well as when he is his own solicitor” (2.1.388-390).

BEAUGARD “Sir Jolly, Sir Jolly, Sir Jolly—. . . . Some advice, some advice, dear friend, ere I’m ruined” (2.1.512-515).

SIR DAVY “Then I may be a cuckold still for aught I know. What will become of me? I have surely lost and ne’er shall find her more” (3.1.75-76).

SIR DAVY “I am an old fellow, troth a very old fellow. I signify little or nothing now” (3.1.135-136).

Lady Dunce “Cut his throat” (3.1.225)

SIR DAVY “A gentleman; yes, madam, I am gentleman, and the world shall find that I am a gentleman” (3.1.245-246).

BEAUGARD “My honourable pimp too, my pander knight, has forsaken me. Methinks I am quandaried like one going with a party to discover the enemy’s camp, but had lost his guide upon the mountains” (3.1.302-305).

BEAUGARD “the business of the nation calls upon me. . . . stand off. I will not lose my preferment for my pleasure” (3.1.424-432).

SIR JOLLY [peeping upon Lady Dunce and Beaugard] “Ah-h-h-h! Ah-h-h-h! (3.2.29).

SIR DAVY “I’ll crack the frame of nature, sally out like Tamburlaine . . . O lord, stop her mouth! Well! And how? And what then? Stopped thy mouth? . . . . I had rather be a cuckold a thousand times than lose thee, poor love” (3.2.69-80).

SIR JOLLY (weeps) “Alack-a-day!” (3.2.81).

BEAUGARD “Ah, Courtine, must we be always idle? Must we never see our glorious days again? When shall we be rolling in the lands of milk and honey . . .” (4.1.9-11).

COURTINE “Ah, Beaugard, those days have been. But now we must resolve to content ourselves at an humble rate. . . . Friends, Beaugard, faithful, hearty friends—things as hard to meet with as preferment here” (4.1.16-23).

BEAUGARD “Ay, now we are at home in our natural hives and sleep like drones” (4.1.27-28).

BEAUGARD. “Friend, friend, there is a difference between a freeborn English cuckold, and a sneaking wittol of a conquered province.
COURTINE. “O, by all means! There ought to be a difference observed between your arbitrary whoring and your limited fornication.
BEAUGARD. And but reason; for, though we may make bold with another man’s wife in a friendly way, yet nothing upon compulsion, dear heart” (4.1.89-96).

Sir Davy. [to Courtine] “Sirrah . . . I’ll use you like a whore. I’ll kiss you, you jade; I’ll ravish you, you buttock” (4.1.420-421).
[to Lady Dunce] “Why, you are not a wench, you rogue; you are a boy, a very boy, and I love you the better for’t, sirrah, hey!” (4.3.22-23).

SIR DAVY. “What shall I do? I’ll throw myself upon him, kiss his wide wounds and weep till blind as buzzard. . . . I’ll give my wife and estate to have him live again.” (4.3.37-44).

SIR DAVY. “What is it dear neighbor? What is it? You see I am upon my knees to you. Take all I have and ease me of my fears” (4.3.49-51).

SIR JOLLY. “Well, I ha’ done, I ha’ done. This ‘tis to be an old fellow now” (4.3.85-86).

COURTINE [to Sylvia, in their proviso scene] “I had rather my ox should graze in a field of my own than live hidebound upon the common” (5.1.108-109).

SYLVIA. “Item: for your own sake you shall promise to keep the estate well-fenced and enclosed, lest sometime or other your neighbour’s cattle break in and spoil the crop on the ground, friend” (5.1.124-126).

SIR JOLLY. (at the door peeping) “Who says I see anything now? I see nothing, not I. I don’t see, I don’t see; I don’t look, not so much as look, not I” (5.3.35-37).

SIR JOLLY. “we are all mortal, neighbor, all mortal” (5.3.74-75).

SIR JOLLY. “Pish! A pox of Antony and Cleopatra! They are dead and rotten long ago. Come, come, time’s but short, time’s but short, and must be made the best use of. . . . frisk, and be brisk, rejoice and make a noise” (5.4.7-15).

[cf. Dryden’s All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1677)]

SIR DAVY. “I am glad to see you are alive again with all my heart. . . . Ha, ha, ha! This is the purest sport. Ha, ha, ha! . . . . I would not care if he had carried away my house and all, man. . . . Poor fool, he does not know I am a cuckold, and, that anybody may make bold with what belongs to me. Ha, ha, ha! I am so pleased. Ha, ha, ha! I think I was never so pleased in all my life before. Ha, ha, ha! . . . . she has five thousand pound to her portion, and my estate’s bound to pay it. Well, this is the happiest day. Ha, ha, ha! . . . . Use me gently, as thou didst my wife. Gently! Ha, ha, ha! . . . . I hope amongst all you, sirs, I shan’t fail / To find one brother-cuckold out for bail” (5.4.84-160).

Notes from the Introduction by Cordner and Clayton

“Robert D. Hume has observed that ‘Poverty is . . . made real’ in The Soldiers’ Fortune; in place of the conventional ‘airy younger son, scrambling to make his fortune’, Otway’s soldiers are grown men ‘facing a bleak future in a desperately inhospitable world’” (Four Restoration Marriage Plays xiv).

Play was enormously popular.

“The propaganda of the Whig party, headed by the Earl of Shaftesbury, alleged a covert conspiracy to subvert the liberty and property of the subject. . . . In The Soldiers’ Fortune Otway reinvents the comedy of marriage for just such a politicized theatre-world. His soldiers are bruisingly explicit in their political partisanship. . . . the social hierarchy has been turned upside down, and those of gentle birth, like Courtine and Beaugard—in Tory iconography, the country’s natural rulers—are condemned to be the slaves of those born to be their servants. The disbanded soldiers live the bitter reality of this in scene after scene” (Four Restoration Marriage Plays xiv-xvi).
“The story has been set up in a manner which ratifies Tory stigmatizing of the Whig as a kind of enemy within. Accordingly, a betrayal which is more than personal triggers a revenge which is both sexual and political” (xvii).
“As the Whigs reduce [Sir Davy] . . . to a tool, so too the would-be adulterers deny him human status and render him merely ‘instrumental’ in their designs” (xviii).

“Reviewing a 1967 London revival, Tom Stoppard thought that the production went ‘right against the play’s ‘grain’ in making the audience respond to Sir Davy at this point as something more than a comic butt, apt for all indignities. . . . but the character is being registered in ways which make it impossible simply to pigeonhole him as the mere unthinking, unfeeling implement of another’s plot. . . . On one level, these events invite reading as a revengeful Tory fantasy, joyfully acting out on the comic stage a scenario pieced together from Whig nightmares. It is not only, however, the intricacy of Otway’s handling of Sir Davy that suggests that the final effect is more multi-textured than that” (xviii-xix).

“Beaugard’s history as adulterer echoes his experience as discarded soldier. In both, he is the plaything of forces over which he exerts no mastery. . . . [Courtine’s and Sylvia’s] encounters also map how totally each feels at risk of subjugation by the other. . . . In courtship and adultery plots alike, The Soldiers’ Fortune enmeshes its characters within entanglements of circumstances and passion to which its ending affords no lasting resolution” (xxi-xxii).

“Now, if any ask me, whence it is that our conversation is so much refin’d? I must freely, and without flattery, ascribe it to the Court; and, in it, particularly to the King; whose example gives a law to it. His own misfortunes, and the nations, afforded him an opportunity, which is rarely allow’d to Sovreign Princes, I mean of travelling, and being conversant in the most polish’d Courts of Europe; and, thereby, of cultivating a Spirit, which was form’d by Nature to receive the impressions of a gallant and generous education. At his Return, he found a Nation lost as much in Barbarism as in Rebellion. And as the excellency of his Nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reform’d the other. The desire of imitating so great a pattern, first waken’d the dull and heavy spirits of the English, from their natural reserv’dness; loosen’d them, from their stiff forms of conversation; and made them easy and plyant to each other in discourse. Thus, insensibly, our way of living became more free.” – John Dryden, Defense of the Epilogue, appended to The Conquest of Granada (second part, qtd. by Richard Braverman)

“Naturally, the comedy of manners does not deal with politics in the manner of the heroic play, yet it is political insofar as it conveys the élan of the court through the charismatic presence of a figure so often affiliated with it. . . . [with] the analogy of the political state as a landed estate. . . . with its latent political end displaced into social conflicts over women and the property they control. . . . the libertine can . . . be seen as an avatar of a ‘sovereign’ idiom in which autonomy is not simply a social but a political preoccupation.” –Richard Braverman, “The Rake’s Progress Revisited: Politics and Comedy in the Restoration” (1995)

Mitchell Greenberg describes the period between 1550-1700 as marked by "both a generalized European fear that chaos is about to descend upon the world and a desire for some force, some leader who would be able to waylay that chaos, establish order and put things that seem askew, aright. [Greenberg suggests and claims that] Perhaps the only cultural production that enables us to identify a unifying element in the enormous heterogeneity of what we are calling 'early modernity' is the almost universal predominance of the theater, its unrivaled status as the most popular and dominant form of representation during the most important transitory moment (1550-1700) in European history. . . . For on the stages of the seventeenth century we are made to witness, in both tragedy and comedy, the various attempts at projecting both the confusions and the possible solutions to these many problems that were offered to a receptive audience as the virtual responses to inarticulate desires" ("The Concept of 'Early Modern'" 2013).

In a similar vein, in a longer list of ‘manifest attributes’ of early modernity, Daniel Vitkus includes (1) “in London, the commercial playhouses” as among the “first modern corporations,” (2) “a change in cognitive outlook that brought a new sense of temporality and historicity,” and (3) “new forms of ‘modern’ subjectivity, including improvisational and discontinuous identity” (“Early Modernity and Emergent Capitalism” 160).

In “From Melancholia to Meaning: How to Live the Past in the Present” (2005), Mari Ruti states that “Lacan advances the counterintuitive idea that the subject’s capacity to tolerate its lack—to accept the fact that some objects will always be unavailable—is a precondition of its ability to love. Without this tolerance for lack, Lacan maintains, the subject is forever condemned to pursue the fantasmatic object of desire, the objet a, in the hope that this object will rescue it from its lack. . . . “If melancholia on the personal level keeps the subject stuck in the past in ways that prevent the possibility of new love, melancholia on the collective level keeps cultures and societies enmeshed in the past in ways that make it impossible for them to move forward” (655-659).

Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (2013), “The witness of survival itself—the awakening that constitutes life—lies not only in the incomprehensible repetition of the past, but in the incomprehensibility of a future that is not yet owned. . . . In what way is the experience of trauma also the experience of an imperative to live? What is the nature of life that continues beyond trauma?” “… creates, in its repetition, something new. . . . Freud thus reintroduces the language of departure not as the origin of the death drive, but as the way it repeats itself, differently, as the drive for life.”

Petar Ramadanovic, “In the Future . . .: On Trauma and Literature” (2002): “In the last twenty years there have been essentially two views of trauma, one that it is a structural disorder and one that it is a historical event. . . . Moreover, isn’t literature precisely a form of turning toward a catastrophe, an instinct, and a desire—an attempt to face them in the most radical and immediate way possible?”

Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (2008): “Trauma, in effect, issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge. In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that seek to explicate the trauma . . . culture rehearses or restates narratives that attempt to animate and explicate trauma that has been formulated as something that exceeds the possibility of narrative knowledge. . . . if trauma is a crisis in representation, then this generates narrative possibility just as much as impossibility, a compulsive outpouring of attempts to formulate narrative knowledge.” “Histories of gender, sexual or racial violence have indubitable reasons for finding explanatory power in ideas of trauma, yet traumatic identity is now also commonly argued to be at the root of many national collective memories. . . . Trauma is a piercing or breach of a border that puts inside and outside into a strange communication. Trauma violently opens passageways between systems that were once discrete, making unforeseen connections that distress or confound.”” I want to put some flesh on the truism that trauma is a concept that can only emerge within modernity.”

Michael Rothberg explores what it means to “declare the category of trauma necessary but not sufficient” (“Beyond Tancred and Clorinda—trauma studies for implicated subjects” in The Future of Trauma Theory, 2014) to add to event-focused trauma theory the analysis of the conditions of structural violence that are neither sudden nor accidental, the exploitation, for example, “in an age of globalized neo-liberal capitalism” (xiv). Rothberg argues that trauma theory has “helped us to think about the relation between perpetrators and victims, and of bystanders, but that we “are more than bystanders and something other than direct perpetrators in the violence of global capital. Rather . . . we are implicated subjects, beneficiaries of a system that generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously” (xv).

Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013): “Subjects structure their everyday social reality around an avoidance of a traumatic kernel that nonetheless haunts that reality and continually upsets its smooth functioning. . . . The encounter with the traumatic gap in signification is inherently a political event because it exposes the contingency of the symbolic structure and makes evident the fundamental symbolic lie. . . . Subjects invest themselves in and submit to the symbolic law insofar as they believe in its ability to confer meaning and identity, and this is precisely what the encounter with the traumatic gap gives the lie to. . . . A society centered around the death drive would not be a better society, nor would it entail less suffering. Rather than continually sacrificing for the sake of the good, we would sacrifice the good for the sake of enjoyment. A society centered around the death drive would allow us to recognize that we enjoy the lost object only insofar as it remains lost.”

Lisa Hinrichsen, Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination, and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature (2015) Lisa Hinrichshen examines the ‘relationship between trauma, fantasy, and the public sphere,” (2) particularly fantasies of “mastery”—of “imagined sovereignty and solidarity” in which a national or regional—in her case, “southern” “imagination is defined by the difficulty in finding a mode of imaginative liberation that neither repeats old fantasies and discourses of power nor fetishizes loss. . . . . Revealed in the text is an inscription (and encryption) of a void, a communicative but elliptical dimension within discourse” (36).
In their dialogic back-and-forth collaborative work Sex, or the Unbearable (2014), Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman offer—as they state at the outset—“an analysis of relations that both overwhelm us and anchor us” (vii), with sex as their exemplary though not exclusive site “at which relationality [particularly in its negativity] is invested with hopes, expectations, and anxieties that are often experienced as unbearable . . . . [even as sex, or as I would put it, relationality and identity at their limit] holds out the prospect of discovering new ways of being” (vii). For Berlant and Edelman, negativity “refers to the psychic and social incoherences and divisions, conscious and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity. It denotes, that is, the relentless force that unsettles the fantasy of sovereignty. But its effects . . . are not just negative, since negativity unleashes the energy that allows for the possibility of change. So too ‘nonsovereignty’ . . . invokes the psychoanalytic notion of the subject’s constitutive division that keeps us, as subjects, from fully knowing or being in control of ourselves and that prompts our misrecognition of our own motives and desires. At the same time, nonsovereignty invokes a political idiom and tradition, broadly indicating questions of self-control, autonomy, and the constraints upon them. To encounter ourselves as nonsovereign . . . is to encounter relationality itself, in the psychic, social, and political senses of the term” (vii-viii). Negativity, then, “disturbs the presumption of sovereignty by way of ‘an encounter’ . . . with the estrangement and intimacy of being in relation. . . . [Moreover,] relationality always includes a scenic component, a fantasmatic staging. It puts into play reaction, accommodation, transference, exchange, and the articulation of narratives” (viii). Berlant, and insistently, Edelman, ask if optimism in the face of negativity, is a disavowal of what’s unbearable in negativity, or if some sort of repair of social relations is possible—a possibility of reparativity. More important, perhaps, than envisioning the possibility of repair/reparativity, Berlant and Edelman show how negativity that destabilizes normative frameworks of coherence can assist as well as undermine the claims of those who are subordinate—subordinated by social conditions of devaluation. They argue, however, that attending to such limits can affirm negativity’s “central role in any antinormative politics” as negativity is seen to resist the “fixity of social forms” (xiii). [from my paper/talk]: To what extent, for example, do the figures of the Restoration rake-hero and disbanded solider, the reverend pimp, the adulterous wife, the virgin with her dowry, and the cuckolded husband, inhabit the genre-inflected fixity of social forms, and therefore to what extent might dramatic figures of dispossession, nonsovereignty, and negativity be seen to resist those forms and identities?

In “The Fall of Fantasies: A Lacanian Reading of Lack,” Mari Ruti explains that “Rather than addressing lack as a consequence of specific … traumas … and oppressive social conditions . . . Lacan is concerned with lack as the ontological underpinning of human existence. . . Lacan is interested in what it means for human beings to face their radical negativity or nothingness, and to wrestle with the recognition that their lives are built on unstable ground. . . .[and therefore] it is only the fall of our most treasured fantasies—particularly of the idea that there is some ‘sovereign good’ that is capable of shielding us from the terror of living—that allows us to transition to a more imaginative and creatively engaged psychic economy. More specifically, the disbanding of fantasies enables us to better listen to the idiosyncratic particularity of our desire, and in so doing to begin to forge a singular identity apart from the social conventions that seek to determine the parameters of our being” (485-486). The condition of lack prompts desire that compels the subject to turn outward, to attend to the world and to bring new objects into being, and to act on the ability to tarry with the negative, “to express the matter in Zizekian/Hegalian terms—is, Ruti claims, “indispensable for [one’s] psychic aliveness . . . . [and gives] rise to a whole host of creative endeavors” (490). I want to claim that by the end of Otway’s comedies, we witness the embodied outcome of those who cannot tolerate lack and those who, surprisingly, seem capable of embracing their roles not as sovereign rulers but as comic instruments of “civil correspondence” and as the dispossessed culturally symbolic bearers of their own and others’ negativity and lack.

In her earlier work, Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011), Berlant states that “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. . . . [She asks] Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies—say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work—when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds? Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world ‘add up to something.’ What happens when those fantasies start to fray . . . ?” (1-3).