Download or read book Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy written by Peggy Thompson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency; this is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.