The Dialectic of Isolation and Beyond in Selected Renaissance Plays

Man's so abrupt a transformation into a self-seeking individualist and the rejection of the Ptolemaic world picture of 1452 and all the Christian dogma in post-Copernican astronomy (1454) is no surprise in the Renaissance, the age of great upheavals and paradoxes. Nevertheless, man's continuing to living with the theological scholasticism tended to be a moral puzzle for the orthodox moralists, verging on the dilemma whether he could uphold the image of man as the Renaissance humanists envisaged.

The project undertakes to examine this view of man, arising out of the Elizabethan experience of the Renaissance overreaching and the self-destructive tendencies within humanism. The sharpness of focus of the query is not alone on why man isolates himself from the system, but on what, he, as a free individual, does later to make it truly humanistic. The resolution seeks, by implication, a philosophy of reintegration between the 'deeds' and the 'faith', the medieval and the modern, which is essential for the survival of humanity and 'keep the balance unimpaired between the unconscious drives of human personality and the rational self.'