English Language and Literature Commons^™

Affecting Manhood: Masculinity, Effeminacy, And The Fop Figure In Early Modern English Drama, Jessica Landis

Doctoral Dissertations

This project identifies and analyzes the fop figure in early modern English drama and treats the figure as a vehicle that reveals the instability of conceptions of masculinity in the period. This project establishes a theatrical history of the character type. Although the fop did not emerge on the English stage as a stock character until late in the seventeenth century, antecedents and proto-fops appear across dramatic genres beginning in the late 1580s. Identifying these characters and deciphering their functions in plot and character development reveals, in part, how cultural anxieties about masculine codes of conduct were manifested. The project …