WEEK 11

RESTORATION DRAMA

Series of WH questions: WHEN, WHERE, for WHOM, WHAT, WHO, WHY,

HOW

1) First we need to define what actually is meant by the Restoration period

itself – so WHEN?

Historically Restoration starts with the restoration of the monarchy after the

period of the Interregnum, as the period between the reign of Charles I and

Charles II is sometimes called. So 1660 – 1688, the Glorious Revolution

but not in art/drama: What is commonly regarded as the restoration period

when applied to drama stretches far beyond the end date and continues

roughly until the end of the century, when after 1700 it is displaced by

sentimental drama.

As is often the case what everyone knows is not always true. Asked

about drama after 1642, the proverbial schoolboy would confidently reply that

the Puritan government put a stop to that. And that during the Interregnum

theatres were closed. Certainly the Parliamentary resolution of 2 September

1642 rings with decisive phrases.

The closing of the theatres was, however, not as conclusive as the words

announce. The very existence of a series of further Parliamentary measures

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against the stage after 1642 indicates that there was still something to put

down. There were occasional surreptitious performances. We know that illicit

performances sometimes took place in London because there are surviving

records of soldiers being sent to close down performances and the riots this

caused. Actors were to be whipped, spectators fined. For example, the Weekly

Intelligencer brought the following report:

Interiors of three London playhouses were destroyed (the Fortune, the

Cockpit and Salisbury Court) but performances were kept alive. Masques

were actually performed at Cromwell’s court for ambassadors and there are

no reports of any attempts to suppress private performances in private

houses. Professional actors changed places of performance, presented theatre

plays as drolls. e.g. rope dancing, or excerpts from plays, e.g. only the

gravediggers scene from Hamlet etc. Drama was not quite dead. But all this

was occasional and not an integral part of cultural life. If some activity existed,

on the whole it can be said that English theatre did NOT develop between 1642

and 1660.

But there is one exception: An adventurous production of The Siege of

Rhodes in 1656, by William Davenant.

William Davenant (1608-68) is significant in many ways. Perhaps less

than as a poet and playwright than as theatre manager, but he does embody

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continuity between the drama of Charles I and Charles II. Shakespeare was

his godfather. Before the Civil war he wrote at least 12 plays and he

collaborated with Inigo Jones in staging masques at court. As a manager, he

governed the King’s and Queen’s Company at the Cockpit in Drury Lane

from 1639.

The 1656 staging of The Siege of Rhodes with a woman actress taking

part (Mrs Coleman) is often mentioned as a pioneering work in English opera.

Performed in semi-private premises at Rutland House, later in 1659 at the

Cockpit at Drury Lane, and after the Restoration it was his first production at

Lincoln Inn’s Fields. For this 1661 production WD changed recitative to

speech, which indicates that the early sung version may have been divised to

evade regulations against plays. This play makes a good starting point for later

Restoration heroic drama: lavish scenery (5 changes of scenery), historical and

not mythological script, yet exotic setting, strong binary patterns of love and

jealousy.

The Puritan experiment in government did not long survive the death of

Oliver Cromwell in 1658 and less than 2 years later, in May 1660 King Charles

II returned from his French and Dutch exile in an atmosphere of general

acclamation and rejoicing.

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 The reaction against Puritan manners and morals was inevitable. It was

made even stronger by the fact that many of the returned Cavaliers (the name

given to the followers of the King in the Civil war), who were exiled with the

King, spent their exile in France and became expert in French wit and

gallantry. The King himself, a sensualist of great wit, encouraged the

atmosphere of hedonism and liveliness at the court. This “merry monarch” set

the tone for the court wits and the court wits set the tone if not for all the

literature of the period, at least for a notable segment of it, especially

Restoration comedy.

WHERE and for WHOM

With the restoration of the King came the restoration of the theatre. But

it was a different theatre, playing to a different kind of audience, from that

which had called forth the plays of Shakespeare.

The King landed in May 1660 and already in August he granted a

monopoly to two theatre companies. This means that only two companies

received a charter allowing them to stage performances. The two companies

were:

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The King’s Company, led by Thomas Killigrew, who performed at the Theatre

Royal at Drury Lane. By 1670 this theatre and a similar one, at Dorset

Gardens, was rebuilt by Christopher Wren.

The second company was The Duke’s Company (the Duke being the King’s

brother, James, Duke of York, the future James II). This company was led by

William Davenant and they performed at the Duke’s Theatre.

Killigrew’s King’s Company consisted mainly of experienced actors from the

open air Red Bull. He also held rights to pre-war plays by Jonson and

Shakespeare. He was more conservative in his repertoire, and ultimately was

not as successful. Davenant was more enthusiastic about shows mingling

music, scenery, dancing and words. Competition resulted in the escalation of

expensive sets. In 1682 The Duke’s Company swallowed the struggling King’s

Company and a United Company was formed. This led to a decline in

dramatic activity, as not so many new plays were needed, and several

dramatists of the time suffered in poverty or switched to different forms. Only

in 1695 a group of breakaway actors led by Thomas Betterton set up a

shareholding company and there was a flood of new premieres.

Despite the King’s fondness for the stage, restrictions on theatrical

activity were not swept away in 1660. Privilege and control, not freedom, was

established. In principle, only Davenant and Killigrew under royal patronage

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could legally produce plays in London. In practice, the situation was not quite

as tidy. Early in the Restoration there were actually several groups of actors

active, and there were also foreign visiting companies. Outside of London

occasional amateur and professional performances took place, and e.g. Dublin

had a notable permanent theatre.

Until the death of Queen Anne in the early 18th century, the Master of

Revels acted as official censor. His interventions usually consisted of the

removal of blasphemous language. He actually received 20 shillings for

licensing an old play and 40 for a new one. Early in the Restoration, the King’s

intervention was positive, he lent his coronation robes for a theatre

production, often visited theatres. He had a private one at Whitehall but liked

to go to the public ones. And he made plays fashionable. But later on,

especially after the 1678 Exclusion Crisis with the social climate full of anxiety

about succession, censorship became more serious and plays were even

banned.

The modern theatre was developed during this period. It developed the

traditions of the private rather than the public Elizabethan and Jacobean

theatre. Clearly, by the year 1642 the only important theatres to be closed

down were the private ones. How did the Restoration theatre differ from the

Elizabethan in theatrical presentation and technique?

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 The most obvious innovation of the Restoration was the introduction of

women actresses. This was inevitable. Several reasons for this. In the years

when the theatres were closed, acting troupes had disbanded, skills were lost,

training was abandoned, and the boys had become men. By then there was a

shortage of boy actors – during the Interregnum new actors were not

recruited to the companies. New acting companies had to be built almost from

scratch, and they looked towards Europe. Also, the exiled Cavaliers were used

to seeing women actresses in Paris and elsewhere. There was also a Stuart

tradition of women performing in court masques, e.g. Charles I’s Queen

Henrietta Maria herself took part including other members of the royal

family. Moreover, English audiences had seen women performing even before

because foreign travelling acting troupes employed women, not boys. An

interesting point is that if one frequent comic device in early modern drama

was crossdressing, in the Restoration women actresses frequently played what

was called breeches parts, i.e. they also dressed as young men. From the first,

English audiences were delighted with the new actresses and became

particularly fond of those who displayed a talent for caricaturing men in these

breeches parts. We can see an example of such crossdressing actually also in

Wycherley’s Country Wife, when the jealous Mr Pinchwife disguises his wife

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Margery as a man, but this certainly does not fool the main protagonist, Mr

Horner.

Another important change is the difference in the physical appearance

of the stage which gradually begins to approach the traditional picture frame

stage. In the Restoration we still do not have the proscenium arch separating

the area of darkness, where the audience sits, and the brightly lit stage, this

“illusionistic” stage is a 19th century development. The Restoration stage was

not sealed off from the audience as it was in the later 18th and 19th century. It is

better seen as transitional.

Restoration theatres had a proscenium arch, equipped with entrance

doors for the players, and the part of the stage on which most of the acting

took place actually thrust out into the auditorium, like a smaller apron. The

stage recessed behind the arch to provide for the scenic stage, whose floor was

grooved to allow for the sliding scenery and for changes of scene. After 1660

movable and changeable scenery was introduced, which was known from

performances at court. A curtain hung from the proscenium arch was raised

after the prologue and not dropped until the epilogue, so all scene changes

were carried out before the spectators. The space behind the arch allowed for

perspective scenery creating illusions of depth, as is seen in the engraving from

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the Empress of Morocco. Sets were expensive, with special effects and stage

machinery allowed for such moments as actors descending on clouds etc.

The stage was raked, i.e. it was sloping upwards, to create better

visibility. So, there was an area called upstage and downstage. Upstage was up,

higher, even if further. From here comes the English phrase, to upstage sb.

meaning to capture attention instead of the person. The actor in the back was

turned to the audience. The one closer had to turn his back to the audience to

address his.

The seating pattern established at these theatres was arranged in boxes,

galleries and the pit, which was known a desirable and fashionable part of the

theatre. These theatres were however rather small. The seating was limited,

around 600 sets (300 to 1000). Admission prices varied according to

performance but always rather high.

As in the private theatres, some members of the audience could sit on

the stage, actors frequently walked close to the audience and addressed them

directly with asides, prologues and epilogues. This was a very interactive

theatre. The audiences delighted in the prologues and epilogues, which after

1660 were less integrally a part of plays with which they appear. The verses

often reflect the audience’s interest in itself, its familiarity with the actors who

are identified as speaking the lines. The epilogue to Dryden’s Tyrannick Love

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(1669) spoken by Nell Gwyn, depends on her reputation: ‘though she lived a

slattern / yet died a princess”.

In Etherege’s The Man of Mode, the Prologue includes a direct address

to the audience. We do not have to import folly, you as the audience are a rich

source of satire. And you do not want to feel offended, because then it is you,

who are depicted.

The new theatres of the Restoration were not aiming to provide mass

entertainment for a wide cross section of the population. Because Restoration

drama catered to the tastes of a different audience. It was an audience that

consisted mainly of the court – the courtiers and their ladies, including the

king himself – the fashionable and the wealthy. The audience was exclusive,

narrowed down to an upper-class elite. This close connection between drama

and its audience means that Restoration culture was aristocratic. The last

English court culture, when the court was the centre of cultural life.

Restoration drama was a class drama to a degree that no earlier English

drama ever had been.

The playhouses were frequented by the wits and gallants as much for

watching the play as for displaying their own clothes and engaging in amorous

intrique. The audience interrupted performances to express witticisms, its

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member chatted with each other. People evidently came to socialize as much as

to see the plays.

}Pepys.

Such a theatre was regarded by respectable citizens as a centre of vice

and exhibitionism and they avoided it. The dramatists, in their turn, took

every opportunity of ridiculing the middle class virtues and often represented

the middle class as made up of fools and jealous husbands whose wives were

good objects for seduction by the court gallants.

The audience was not only socially restricted but also geographically.

There was little dramatic activity of any consequence outside of London and

for most of the time there were even in the metropolis only 2 theatres.

Moreover, for more than a decade there was the United Company.

Necessarily Restoration comedy is always located in the city. The

country is perceived as a place of boredom, a place that lacks the polish and

vivacity of the big city.

WHAT

Clearly, Restoration drama cannot be restricted only to comedies. The

Restoration brought about two experiments with new forms and the most

notable ones are heroic drama and the comedy of manners.

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 Heroic dramas are now largely forgotten. Mostly written in verse. They

were characterized by grand, lofty, extreme style. The language is elevated,

action exaggerated. They are full of lengthy speeches, violence, sudden plot

reversals. Most of them inspired by historical topics.

In the 60s these heroic dramas follow the patterns and plots of French

romance literature. They are usually set in locations distant in time and place.

They present characters with dilemmas based on conflicts between public duty

and personal desire. These plays may seem escapist and unreal but they had

relevance to the events and politics of the time. In the 1660s the plays deal with

issues of legitimate authority. Usurpation and exile are major themes. The

hero is frequently revealed as the true heir and triumphantly enthroned. The

plays delineate the contemporary dilemmas of dangerous loyalty to an exiled

monarch or a comfortable life under the usurper that many in the audience

had experienced.

The trend for heroic couplet drama was set by Roger Boyle, Earl of

Orrery in his 1664 play Henry the Fifth. The choice was quite topical given

King Charles II’s reputation for debauchery maturing into a competent king.

Other examples are several plays by John Dryden The Conquest of Granada

(in the prologue he admits great influence of The Siege of Rhodes), 1670, or

1664 The Indian Queen. Perhaps for us more important is

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All for Love, a rewriting of Sh’s Antony and Cleopatra, in blankverse, 1677,

which in true classicist fashion limits the global sweep of the original to the last

24 hours in its adherence to the unities. The fashion for heroic couplet plays

was ended by Dryden’s exotic Aureng-Zebe (1675).

Not only in form, the plays of the 70s differed also in themes. From the

70s a new generation of playwrights like Thomas Otway (Venice Preserved in

blank verse), Nathaniel Lee and others bring new more topical themes. Not the

past anymore but the uncomfortable and disillusioned present. Especially

anxiety over succession (king’s wife barren, the heir a proclaimed catholic).

The new dramas turned to blood, lust, heroes not tried and tested and

emerging with honour intact, but rather morally ambiguous, the villains

charismatic. Plots are set in motion not by competing rights but by lusty

queens or kings competing for their son’s mistresses. Regal authority is

uncertain. In these themes and plots and incident there is an obvious return to

Jacobean models.

Comedies of manners

The term was invented by Charles Lamb in the early 19th century. To

characterise them briefly, these were satiric presentations of the falseness and

artificiality of the aristocracy and its imitators. They were mostly written by

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aristocratic men who could comically dissect and make fun of the follies of the

social classes. The plays frequently consisted of complicated plots about

adultery, sexual intrique and money. They were high spirited, and cynical.

Their aim was, according to Dryden, that “gentlemen will be entertained with

the follies of each other”. In another sense, we have an interactive theatre: as

we saw before, the audience identifies with it, not as the heroes and heroines

but the objects of satire. See prologue

They present a world where grace and style are all important. Where

elegance of dress and manner of behaviour is matched by elegance of

language, that is, where intelligent wit is shown in elegant style and manner,

intelligent and lively wit. The speech consists of epigrams and lively repartee

(clever, witty answer). At the centre of this type of comedy is always the

relationship between the sexes, which is presented as witty and intellectual

rather than emotional or passionate. These plays are written in prose, using

plain expression not metaphors or rich suggestive language.

WHO

The first English playwright of Restoration comedy was Sir George

Etherege (1635-1691). He was a nobleman, a courtier, who spent years in exile

in the company of the King, he was one of the banished cavaliers. He also

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wrote plays for pleasure. The motto of his life was “gaiety at all costs” and his

plays are characterized by a rather cynical approach to the world and to

moral values. In this he is certainly one of the representatives of what is called

the libertine ethos of the time.

In 1664 the first Restoration comedy was performed The Comical

Revenge or Love in a Tub. If not yet an ideal example of the comedy of

manners, it at least set the pattern for later comic drama. It aims at a realistic

portrayal of the life style of his contemporaries. The dialogue is more

important than the plot.

She Would if she Could

But most important is The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676),

Etherege’s last and most famous play.

Sir Fopling is a fool who imagines that a fine set of Parisian clothes and

a few French phrases will make him admired in London. His character is then

a foil to the truly witty and more sensible men of the town, Dorimant and his

friend Medley, i.e. Fopling serves to enhance their more positive

characteristics. Dorimant is a portrait of the famous libertine poet of the time,

the Earl of Rochester. Dorimant is a man about town who is casting off one

mistress, Loveit, seducing a second, Belinda, and trying to marry a third,

Harriet. He is a character both predatory and cynical, and charming and

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attractive. He finally emerges as the hero – not because he deserves Harriet

but because he wins her. She, however, as a typical Restoration comedy

heroine is a strong and independent minded woman and she humbles him in

the end because he wins her under her conditions – they will live in the

country.

Sir Fopling’s name is an allusion to the figure of the fop. In comedies of

manners we find series of thematic and character parallels and contrasts. The

most essential one is that between the gallant and the fop. The gallant

(galantni dzentlmen), the cavalier, differs from the beau (svihak) or fop not so

much in his behaviour but mainly by his good taste, his social behaviour and

wit, which is natural or seems natural, not affected, assumed, copied and

imitated. And, most importantly, in his art of love. The fop is a would-be

gallant. He is laughed at not because he is trying to do or be something in itself

contemptible, but rather because he is trying unsuccessfully and awkwardly to

be something which, if performed it well, would make like the play’s hero. The

fop serves to make the gallant’s wit seem brighter.

In order to grasp fully the real meaning of Restoration comedy, we must

realise that the Restoration did not criticize affectation in order to celebrate

naturalness, a direct relationship between inner nature and its outward form

and appearance. Quite on the contrary. This is the period of concealment

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behind masks and fans. Social intercourse obliges men and women to disguise

their real thoughts and feelings in politeness, elegance, gestures. The hero and

heroine is the one who accepts this and performs it with grace. The fop the

man who performs this awkwardly. Or, to put his in more general terms:

affectation has two sides to it. On the one hand, it signifies hypocrisy,

dissimulation and mere vanity (as in the fop) but on the other it stands for the

necessary and desirable social forms through which the “natural man” must

find expression, i.e not wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve – which

paradoxically forces the Restoration comedy heroes and heroines, like Loveit,

Bellinda, Margery Pinchwife, Miss Prue to constant deception and subterfuge,

but striking a balance between desire and decorum.

All comedy makes use of disguise in one form or another and nearly all

literature is concerned with the difference between the outward appearance

and inner reality. What makes Restoration comedy distinctive is first, the

frequency with which disguise is used and the major part it plays in the action.

And secondly, the new view which these dramatists take of the relationship

between outward form and inner nature.

Up to this time it had been taken for granted that if the outer form did

not correspond to the inner nature, this was something out of the ordinary

which had to be accounted for, a cause for pleased surprise or outrage. But in

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the late 17th century, and specifically in Restoration drama, we encounter for

the first time the idea that the discrepancy between form and nature is not

only surprising but necessary and even desirable.

In this new conception of the relationship between appearance and

nature we can see clearly one of the ways in which new developments in

scientific thought and activity were shaping the imaginative vision of the age.

It is no accident that the Restoration period sees the founding of the Royal

Society For all its irresponsible gaiety the court of Charles II was very much

alive to new ways of thinking in scientific philosophy. There is an evident

connection, for instance, between the way the dramatists take for granted the

existence of a discrepancy between inner and outer nature, and the visual

revelation of such a gap through microscopic and ordinary observation.

Plurality of worlds….

The scepticism of the age made belief in absolute values difficult if not

impossible, and much of the satire against the older generation is directed at

their belief in the old order of things.

Another famous playwright of the 1st generation of restoration

dramatists is William Wycherley (1640-1716). Like Etherege he had an

aristocratic background and built upon Etherege’s example. He moves to an

even more cynical and scornful presentation of immorality and licentiousness.

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his plays are full of frivolity and even verge on vulgarity in speech. He wrote

four plays. The most famous are The Plain Dealer, the model for which was

Moliere’s Le Misanthrop, and The Country Wife (1675), a satirical

masterpiece, perhaos the first full comedy of manners, typical in its double

entendre and moral ambiguity.

Etherege, Wycherley and other playwrights of the first generation

developed a set of theatrical conventions and stock characters that were later

exploited by the second wave of Restoration dramatists:

John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), play The Relapse. He was also an architect

of great renown, a follower of Christopher Wren. He worked on Blenheim

Palace, Castle Howard in Yorkshire (he collaborated with Nicholas

Hawksmoor).

George Farquhar (1678-1707)

Especially, William Congreve (1670-1729) who represents probably the

highest achievement of Restoration comedy. He was probably the most

educated and the wittiest of the playwrights of his time. His father was the

younger son in a gentrified family, a soldier and was stationed with the army

in Ireland during William Congreve’s youth. As a student, Congreve attended

the same schools as Jonathan Swift. In 1691 he came to London to study law

but was soon attracted to literature and the theatre. He became acquainted

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with John Dryden and was encouraged by him to take up writing. Congreve

began in literature with a prose tale called Incognita (1692)

Soon after, Congreve moved to plays which are his greatest contribution

although he spent only 7 years of his life as a playwright.

Highly praised are his plays The Old Bachelor and The Double Dealer. A huge

success was Love for Love. A little less so The Mourning Bride and what is

called the last of the Restoration comedies, The Way of the Wolrd. This is a

very clever play, but maybe its plot is too complicated, it is difficult to follow

and it was not a huge success. The taste of the public by then was also

changing and the more domestic sentimental plays were setting in to take over

the theatrical scene in the next decades.

Congreve’s plays are also full of concise and witty, brilliant dialogue.

but ehind the shine and brilliance, there is less light-heatedness than in most of

the plays of his time. His characters may be libertines, but they are always

earnest and honest.

WHY

or what are main aims of this comedy? Comedies of manners are

satirical plays. We may ask what is/are the object(s) of satire? Best to compare

them with comedies of humours.

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 Ben Jonson’s object were basic human weaknesses, even sins – lust,

avarice, vanity etc. – and he disclosed them with and ridiculed them with

furiously wicked satiric wit. The evils the Restoration dramatist laughs at are

those that concern indeed rather manners than morals. So, while the comedy

of humours set out to correct human vices by laughing them to scorn, the

Restoration comedy aimed at showing those characters that were deficient in

the manners and accomplishments of a gentleman and whose efforts to make

up for this deficiency made them ridiculous. While it is true to say that the

chief source of the Restoration comedy is indeed the late Elizabethan and

Jacobean drama, there is a difference between the two in the seriousness of

presentation and depth of the didactic intent. Jonson uses the tone of harsh

mockery, The Restoration playwright gives us rather self-indulgent and genial

laughter.

HOW

does the dramatist go about achieving this aim, what are him main tools?

The most important is characterization. Just like the comedy of humours, our

type of comedy also took types, allegories of human qualities. The very names

of the acting persons indicate what they stand for (type names). Valentine, the

lover. Angellica, the true worthy of love heroine, Alithea – true and

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honourable, faithful to her promise, Sir Samson Legend, the aristocrat so full

of himself, or the astrologer Mr Foresight, the man who thinks he is a very

witty speaker and who is called Mr Tattle, the prudish and hypocritical Mrs

Frail etc. etc. But these names are different than the one we get in Volpone.

The qualities that we get in these type names are somehow more superficial,

less separated, less abstract than those in Volpone.

The Restoration playwrights are less allegorical and far more realistic.

They drew their characters from life much more, even though also comic

caricatures and stock characters abound. But they are much less abstract. The

target are the qualities that are not inborn, they are not really sins and vices,

but learnt qualities, or – the acquired follies of humans, not deep

characteristics. The plays deal more with social affectations. The aim is to cure

excess and eccentricities, all abberations from the norm, to find the happy

mean (as the classics said – the golden mean) – through the method of

presenting up for ridicule portraits of ridiculous eccentrics.

There are series of thematic parallels and contrast, typically love versus

money, spontaneity versus calculation, young versus old etc. Mirroring of

society is combined with stylized patterning. At the centre of the comedy is the

man of wit and fashion. As foils for the hero the dramatist set two kings of

contrast. Either the older, puritanical character (this e.g. in earlier play, such

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as Etherege’s 1668 She would if she could where Puritan lifestyle and clothing

is ridiculed, while Cavaliers are represented as fun-loving, open-hearted. But

Cavalier were soon out of fashion. As they lose influence on the king, those

who shared his exile are soon equated with outmoded and unrewarded

concepts of honour. So, in the 70s comic heroes express a libertine skepticism

with regard to social and sexual matters. Sexual idiom and innuendo shapes

the discourse of liberty, rights, loyalty as expressed in terms of family life,

potency and impotence. Against such heroes are pitted, the fops, the

pretenders to wit.

But for the central contrast of the play, a conflict of equals is needed.

The hero is thus placed against an equal in wit and grace and style, a woman

who can conquer him and yield to him, both at once. This pattern seems to fit

best Congreve’s plays, better than those produce under Charles II. The love

that Angellica and Valentine declare for each other is more genuine than in

any of the previous plays.

The comedies of this period generally follow the mode of Caroline social

comedy rather than that of Shakespearean romance. It is set in London

locations familiar to the audience – Pall Mall, Covent Garden, Westminster

and the City }for business]. The characters are generally not aristocrats or

rogues, but the sons of the landed gentry, wealthy heiresses, rich city

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merchants, the gentlemen of leisure and pleasure. The structure of plot varies

– from virtually plotless plays (Etherege’s The Man of Mode), dual plots

(Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode, E’s Love in a Tub, where the high plot

involves noble characters and verse, x low comedy, prose) to densely plotted

comedy of intrique with large casts of characters, lots of action, esp. Aphra

Behn. The pays could involve burlesque, commedia del arte modes etc. a wide

range of comic modes.

Critical opinions of Restoration drama have in the past tended to focus

on its lack of clear ethical basis. Debauched, carnal, indecent, coarse, such

words have been attached to it in even the most scholarly of studies (Allardyce

Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama, 1940). Studies of restoration drama

tended to focus on values or morality, echoing Jeremy Colliers famous rebuke

in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage

(1698).

This was the most effective attack on the indecencies of language and

situation in comedy. JC was an Anglican clergyman, no Puritan. The attack

was mainly directed at Dryden and Congreve, among others. Collier spoke for

the outraged moral sense of the godly middle classes as well as for the church,

and his attack helped to discredit WIT and the wits as subversive of religion

and morals. (One of the tasks of the future generation in the early 18th century,

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such as Addison and Steele, or Pope in his Essay on Criticism) was to

rehabilitate wit by making it the servant of social and moral decorum.)When

Dryden died in 1700 a more respectable, if not actually virtuous, society was

coming into being.

But given the supreme decency of the drama that was to follow for nearly two

hundred years, with a few exceptions, this is a refreshing moment.

What may be more disappointing, given for example the centrality of

such issues as questioning traditional authorities, the prominence of female

protagonist etc. and also - Curiously, given that Restoration drama is often

equated with bawdiness, even subversion of traditional morality, the extent to

which these comedies explore subversively a new sexual morality is, I think

exaggerated. Virgins remain virgins (even if they try hard like Miss Prue in

Love for Love), their goal, i.e. marriage, is shared by the young men who

pursue them. Double standard reigns. Women with keep sexual appetites like

men are always comic. They may get away with this behaviour, as Lady Fidget

and …. ???? in The Country Wife, or end up punished by being tricked into a

marriage with someone unwanted, as Mrs Frail in L and L.

Few comedies suggest that the institution of marriage in itself is bad. It

is the materialist criteria that are attacked. There is a connection made

between arranged marriages and prostitution. Marriage to women of vivacity

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and intelligence provides the formulaic conclusion – a trend toward

companionate marriage.

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