Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the imperfect enjoyment
- 1 Hobbes and the libertines
- 2 The tyranny of desire: sex and politics in Rochester
- 3 Absent from thee
- 4 Playing trick for trick: domestic rebellion and the female libertine
- 5 My masculine part: Aphra Behn and the androgynous imagination
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
1 - Hobbes and the libertines
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the imperfect enjoyment
- 1 Hobbes and the libertines
- 2 The tyranny of desire: sex and politics in Rochester
- 3 Absent from thee
- 4 Playing trick for trick: domestic rebellion and the female libertine
- 5 My masculine part: Aphra Behn and the androgynous imagination
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The name of Hobbes is frequently invoked in twentieth-century critical discussions of Restoration comedy and of the poems of Rochester. Certainly, there can be no doubt of the pervasiveness of libertine views in court circles during the Restoration period: a fashionable ‘atheism’ and scorn for the ‘dullness’ of conservative belief served as badges of acceptance among the fraternity of wits. The large number of pamphlets directed against libertine principles during the period testified that such views, usually associated with the demonised figure of Hobbes, were widely perceived as dangerous, a widely disseminated ‘poyson’ for which an antidote must be provided. A similar vocabulary of seduction and contagion – ‘Ill Qualities ought to have ill Names, to prevent their being Catching’ – characterises Jeremy Collier's attack on Restoration comedy in A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) and the dire warnings of Thomas Tenison in The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined (1670) about how the philosophy of Hobbes, having ‘seduc'd and poyson'd [the] Imaginations’ of susceptible readers, has ‘spread its malignity amongst us’ and ‘infected some who can and more who cannot read a difficult Author’.
Throughout the period, ‘modern atheism’ and its Epicurean predecessors tended to be conflated. As Thomas Creech writes in the preface to his translation of Lucretius: ‘The admirers of Mr. Hobbes may easily discern that his Politicks are but Lucretius enlarg'd; His state of Nature is sung by our Poet … the beginning of Societies; the Criterions of Just and Unjust exactly the same, and natural Consequents of the Epicurean Origine of Man.’
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- Information
- Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature , pp. 22 - 51Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995