The Plain Dealer

The Plain Dealer charts the efforts of the surly, asocial Captain Manly, betrothed to Olivia and betrayed by her and his best friend Vernish, to not only reclaim the fortune he had entrusted to her before going to war but also avenge the betrayal by exposing her duplicity. In this enterprise he enlists the help of Fidelia, who he thinks is a young man but is in fact a young woman of fortune so deeply in love with him that she has disguised herself as his page. Like Alceste in Mis., Manly disdains virtually all of society. Unlike Alceste, Manly is mercilessly, bitterly persistent in pursuing his revenge on Olivia, even though he is sidetracked by unwilling involvement in one of the many lawsuits being pursued by an acquaintance, the Widow Blackacre.

The pattern of ideas in The Plain Dealer can be usefully charted by referenc

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t merely coquettish but so programmatically deceptive that she lies even to family members about her taste for society, fashion, the court, marriage. "Marriage!" she tells her rather decent cousin Eliza, "what a pleasure you have found out! I nauseate it of all things" (II.i). Yet when Manly asks her to return the money and jewels he gave her, she frames her answer so as to suggest Manly's ill breeding and contempt for her for asking for them: "I have delivered your jewels to . . . [m]y husband. . . . I dare not ask him for your jewels again, to restore 'em to you; lest he should conclude you never would have parted with 'em to me, on any other score, but the exchange of my honour: which rather than you'd let me use, you'd lose I'm sure yourself, those trifles of yours" (II.i). Plot resolution The Plain Dealer is largely contingent on the emergence of Manly's character, particularly as it balances and responds to Olivia's. Yet it is Manly's character that has been the source of much critical controversy. For Katherine Rogers, for example, the action of The Plain Dealer and the development of its hero Manly create an unsatisfactorily resolved moral and dramatic tension. The play is written, therefore, from two incom
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Plain Dealer, Rogers Weales, Rogers Manly, Manly Connely, Master Lely's, Twelfth Night, Olivia Novel, Acaste Clitandre, Celimene Mis, Manly Fidelia, plain dealer, william wycherley, gossip scene, manly's character, revenge olivia, restoration society, york charles scribner's, moral idealist, garden city, le misanthrope, social context, charles scribner's sons, york harvestharcourt 1954,
Approximate Word count = 2742
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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