Women’s War Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century
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Women’s War Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century By Bre ...

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As the work of Hobbes was so influential in this period, it is important to consider the relevance of his main theories to the drama in question. Hobbes was born in 1588 and experienced the vicissitudes of the Civil War, the Protectorate, and the Restoration. Because of the anarchy that he personally witnessed, he developed a philosophical doctrine which proposed that citizens should acquiesce to state authority in order to make a peaceful Commonwealth. Hobbes saw humans as physical objects, motivated by selfishness and greed.9 He was concerned with establishing peace, but at the same time he saw this combative streak in mankind as working against peace. He pointed out that people desire their own liberty yet at the same time desire to have dominion over others. If control is lost, the result will be war:

The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in which wee see them live in (Common-wealths,) is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent (as hath been shewn) to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe.10

Hobbes advocated that men should draw up mutual covenants in order to establish a balance between individual freedom and the collective good:

But as men, for the atteyning of peace, and conservation of themselves thereby, have made an Artificiall Man which we call a Common-wealth; so also have they made Artificiall Chains, called Civill Lawes, which they themselves, by mutuall covenants, have fastened at one end, to the lips of that Man, or Assembly, to whom they have given the Soveraigne Power.11

After the turmoil of the Civil War, Hobbes’ Leviathan was seen as a crucial work, and its astute political analysis of life as “nasty, brutish and short” was borne out by the bloody events of the Civil War.