抄録
During nearly two hundred years, starting from the period of English Renaissance, all through the two revolutions in the seventeenth century, and getting at the heyday of middle class in the eighteenth century, there was a constant flow of drastic change in the aspect of English society. The history of English drama shows that domestic drama was born, developed, and attained full growth in the same span of time mentioned above. This new genre of drama was shaped as the new sense of value was getting dominant in English society which made greater account of commoners in place of the persons of high rank such as princes and aristocrats. Domestic drama is usually defined as a drama dealing with ordinary events of ordinary people in a serious manner. This feature of domestic drama, however, is not correct as far as English plays of the eighteenth century are concerned. At least there was no such a common man as Willy Loman in The Death of a Salesman (1949) on the eighteenth century English stage. The object in this paper is to analyze George Lillo's The London Merchant (1731), the most popular domestic drama in this century, and to clarify the exact social status of leading characters, compared with the cases of other plays of his own and of other contemporary dramatists, coming to a conclusion that the plot of the eighteenth century domestic tragedy was com-posed with gentlemen or the persons of upper middle class as its centre. Together with the subject of social status of characters, financial factor is another important element of the new drama. This is peculiar to the new tragedy quite unknown to the traditional one. So we might say domestic tragedy in the eighteenth century was based mainly on the fatal financial ruin of the persons of upper middle class in England.
