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Restoration comedy

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Theatre

   Refinement meets burlesque in Restoration comedy. In this scene from
   George Etherege's Love in a Tub, musicians and well-bred ladies
   surround a man who is wearing a tub because he has lost his pants.
   Refinement meets burlesque in Restoration comedy. In this scene from
   George Etherege's Love in a Tub, musicians and well-bred ladies
   surround a man who is wearing a tub because he has lost his pants.

   Restoration comedy is the name given to English comedies written and
   performed in the Restoration period from 1660 to 1700. After public
   stage performances had been banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime,
   the re-opening of the theatres in 1660 signaled a rebirth of English
   drama. Restoration comedy is famous (or notorious) for its sexual
   explicitness, a quality encouraged by Charles II (1660–1685) personally
   and by the rakish aristocratic ethos of his court. The socially diverse
   audiences included both aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on, and
   a substantial middle-class segment. These playgoers were attracted to
   the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, by crowded and
   bustling plots, by the introduction of the first professional
   actresses, and by the rise of the first celebrity actors. This period
   saw the first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn.

Theatre companies

Original patent companies, 1660–82

   The sumptuously decorated Dorset Gardens playhouse in 1673, with one of
   the sets for Elkannah Settle's The Empress of Morocco. The apron stage
   at the front which allowed intimate audience contact is not visible in
   the picture (the artist is standing on it).
   Enlarge
   The sumptuously decorated Dorset Gardens playhouse in 1673, with one of
   the sets for Elkannah Settle's The Empress of Morocco. The apron stage
   at the front which allowed intimate audience contact is not visible in
   the picture (the artist is standing on it).

   Charles II was an active and interested patron of the drama. Soon after
   his restoration, in 1660, he granted exclusive play-staging rights,
   so-called Royal patents, to the King's Company and the Duke's Company,
   led by two middle-aged Caroline playwrights, Thomas Killigrew and
   William Davenant. The patentees scrambled for performance rights to the
   previous generation's Jacobean and Caroline plays, which were the first
   necessity for economic survival before any new plays existed. Their
   next priority was to build new, splendid patent theatres in Drury Lane
   and Dorset Gardens, respectively. Striving to outdo each other in
   magnificence, Killigrew and Davenant ended up with quite similar
   theatres, both designed by Christopher Wren, both optimally provided
   for music and dancing, and both fitted with moveable scenery and
   elaborate machines for thunder, lightning, and waves.

   The audience of the early Restoration period was not exclusively
   courtly, as has sometimes been supposed, but it was quite small and
   could barely support two companies. There was no untapped reserve of
   occasional playgoers. Ten consecutive performances constituted a smash
   hit. This closed system forced playwrights to be extremely responsive
   to popular taste. Fashions in the drama would change almost week by
   week rather than season by season, as each company responded to the
   offerings of the other, and new plays were urgently sought. The King's
   Company and the Duke's Company vied with one another for audience
   favour, for popular actors, and for new plays, and in this hectic
   climate the new genres of heroic drama, pathetic drama, and Restoration
   comedy were born and flourished.

United Company, 1682–95

   Both the quantity and quality of the drama suffered when in 1682 the
   more successful Duke's Company ate the struggling King's Company, and
   the amalgamated United Company was formed. The production of new plays
   dropped off sharply in the 1680s, affected by both the monopoly and the
   political situation (see Decline of comedy below). The influence and
   the incomes of the actors dropped, too. In the late 80s, predatory
   investors ("Adventurers") converged on the United Company, while
   management was taken over by the lawyer Christopher Rich. Rich
   attempted to finance a tangle of "farmed" shares and sleeping partners
   by slashing salaries and, dangerously, by abolishing the traditional
   perks of senior performers, who were stars with the clout to fight
   back.

War of the theatres, 1695–1700

   The company owners, wrote the young United Company employee Colley
   Cibber, "who had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently
   presum'd they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their
   people, did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to
   enslave a set of actors whom the public were inclined to support."
   Performers like the legendary Thomas Betterton, the tragedienne
   Elizabeth Barry, and the rising young comedienne Anne Bracegirdle had
   the audience on their side and, in the confidence of this, they walked
   out.

   The actors gained a Royal "licence to perform", thus bypassing Rich's
   ownership of both the original Duke's and King's Company patents from
   1660, and formed their own cooperative company. This unique venture was
   set up with detailed rules for avoiding arbitrary managerial authority,
   regulating the ten actors' shares, the conditions of salaried
   employees, and the sickness and retirement benefits of both categories.
   The cooperative had the good luck to open in 1695 with the première of
   William Congreve's famous Love For Love and the skill to make it a huge
   box-office success.

   London again had two competing companies. Their dash to attract
   audiences briefly revitalized Restoration drama, but also set it on a
   fatal downhill slope to the lowest common denominator of public taste.
   Rich's company notoriously offered Bartholomew Fair-type attractions —
   high kickers, jugglers, ropedancers, performing animals — while the
   cooperating actors, even as they appealed to snobbery by setting
   themselves up as the only legitimate theatre company in London, were
   not above retaliating with "prologues recited by boys of five, and
   epilogues declaimed by ladies on horseback" (Dobrée, xxi). The demand
   for new plays stimulated William Congreve and John Vanbrugh into
   writing some of their best comedies, but also gave birth to the new
   genre of sentimental comedy, which was soon to replace Restoration
   comedy in the public favour.

Actors

First actresses

   Nell Gwynn was one of the first actresses and the mistress of Charles
   II.
   Enlarge
   Nell Gwynn was one of the first actresses and the mistress of Charles
   II.

   Restoration comedy was strongly influenced by the introduction of the
   first professional actresses. Before the closing of the theatres, all
   female roles had been played by boys, and the predominantly male
   audiences of the 1660s and 1670s were both curious, censorious, and
   delighted at the novelty of seeing real women engage in risqué repartee
   and take part in physical seduction scenes. Samuel Pepys refers many
   times in his famous diary to visiting the playhouse in order to watch
   or re-watch the performance of some particular actress, and to how much
   he enjoys these experiences.

   Daringly suggestive comedy scenes involving women became especially
   common, although of course Restoration actresses were, just like male
   actors, expected to do justice to all kinds and moods of plays. (Their
   role in the development of Restoration tragedy is also important,
   compare She-tragedy.)

   A new speciality introduced almost as early as the actresses was the
   breeches role, which called for an actress to appear in male clothes
   (breeches being tight-fitting knee-length pants, the standard male
   garment of the time), for instance in order to play a witty heroine who
   disguises herself as a boy to hide, or to engage in escapades
   disallowed to girls. A quarter of the plays produced on the London
   stage between 1660 and 1700 contained breeches roles. Playing these
   cross-dressing roles, women behaved with the freedom society allowed to
   men, and some feminist critics, such as Jacqueline Pearson, regard them
   as subversive of conventional gender roles and empowering for female
   members of the audience. Elizabeth Howe has objected that the male
   disguise, when studied in relation to playtexts, prologues, and
   epilogues, comes out as "little more than yet another means of
   displaying the actress as a sexual object" to male patrons, by showing
   off her body, normally hidden by a skirt, outlined by the male outfit.

   Successful Restoration actresses include Charles II's mistress Nell
   Gwyn, the tragedienne Elizabeth Barry who was famous for her ability to
   "move the passions" and make whole audiences cry, the 1690s comedienne
   Anne Bracegirdle, and Susanna Mountfort (a.k.a. Susanna Verbruggen),
   who had many breeches roles written especially for her in the 1680s and
   90s. Letters and memoirs of the period show that both men and women in
   the audience greatly relished Mountfort's swaggering, roistering
   impersonations of young women wearing breeches and thereby enjoying the
   social and sexual freedom of the male Restoration rake.

First celebrity actors

   Thomas Betterton played the irresistible Dorimant in George Etherege's
   Man of Mode. Betterton's acting ability was praised by Samuel Pepys,
   Alexander Pope, and Colley Cibber.
   Enlarge
   Thomas Betterton played the irresistible Dorimant in George Etherege's
   Man of Mode. Betterton's acting ability was praised by Samuel Pepys,
   Alexander Pope, and Colley Cibber.

   During the Restoration period, both male and female actors on the
   London stage became for the first time public personalities and
   celebrities. Documents of the period show audiences being attracted to
   performances by the talents of particular actors as much as by
   particular plays, and more than by authors (who seem to have been the
   least important draw, no performance being advertised by author until
   1699). Although the playhouses were built for large audiences—the
   second Drury Lane theatre from 1674 held 2000 patrons — they were of
   compact design, and an actor's charisma could be intimately projected
   from the thrust stage.

   With two companies competing for their services from 1660 to 1682, star
   actors were able to negotiate star deals, comprising company shares and
   benefit nights as well as salaries. This advantageous situation changed
   when the two companies were amalgamated in 1682, but the way the actors
   rebelled and took command of a new company in 1695 is in itself an
   illustration of how far their status and power had developed since
   1660.

   The greatest fixed stars among Restoration actors were Elizabeth Barry
   ("Famous Mrs Barry" who "forc 'd Tears from the Eyes of her Auditory")
   and Thomas Betterton, both of them active in organising the actors'
   revolt in 1695 and both original patent-holders in the resulting
   actors' cooperative.

   Betterton played every great male part there was from 1660 into the
   18th century. After watching Hamlet in 1661, Samuel Pepys reports in
   his diary that the young beginner Betterton "did the prince's part
   beyond imagination." Betterton's expressive performances seem to have
   attracted playgoers as magnetically as did the novelty of seeing women
   on the stage. He was soon established as the leading man of the Duke's
   Company, and played Dorimant, the seminal irresistible Restoration
   rake, at the première of George Etherege's Man of Mode (1676).
   Betterton's position remained unassailable through the 1680s, both as
   the leading man of the United Company and as its stage manager and de
   facto day-to-day leader. He remained loyal to Rich longer than many of
   his coworkers, but eventually it was he who headed the actors' walkout
   in 1695, and who became the acting manager of the new company.

Comedies

   Variety and dizzying fashion changes are typical of Restoration comedy.
   Even though the "Restoration drama" unit taught to college students is
   likely to be telescoped in a way that makes the plays all sound
   contemporary, scholars now have a strong sense of the rapid evolution
   of English drama over these forty years and of its social and political
   causes. The influence of theatre company competition and playhouse
   economics is also acknowledged.

   Restoration comedy peaked twice. The genre came to spectacular maturity
   in the mid-1670s with an extravaganza of aristocratic comedies. Twenty
   lean years followed this short golden age, although the achievement of
   Aphra Behn in the 1680s is to be noted. In the mid-1690s a brief second
   Restoration comedy renaissance arose, aimed at a wider audience. The
   comedies of the golden 1670s and 1690s peak times are extremely
   different from each other. An attempt is made below to illustrate the
   generational taste shift by describing The Country Wife (1676) and The
   Provoked Wife (1697) in some detail. These two plays differ from each
   other in some typical ways, just as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s
   differs from one of the 1970s. The plays are not, however, offered as
   being "typical" of their decades. Indeed, there exist no typical
   comedies of the 1670s or the 1690s; even within these two short
   peak-times, comedy types kept mutating and multiplying.

Aristocratic comedy, 1660–80

   The drama of the 1660s and 1670s was vitalised by the competition
   between the two patent companies created at the Restoration, as well as
   by the personal interest of Charles II, and the comic playwrights rose
   to the demand for new plays. They stole freely from the contemporary
   French and Spanish stage, from English Jacobean and Caroline plays, and
   even from Greek and Roman classical comedies, and combined the looted
   plotlines in adventurous ways. Resulting differences of tone in a
   single play were appreciated rather than frowned on, as the audience
   prized "variety" within as well as between plays. Early Restoration
   audiences had little enthusiasm for structurally simple, well-shaped
   comedies such as those of Molière; they demanded bustling, crowded
   multi-plot action and fast pace. Even a splash of high heroic drama
   might be thrown in to enrich the comedy mix, as in George Etherege's
   Love in a Tub (1664), which has one heroic verse "conflict between love
   and friendship" plot, one urbane wit comedy plot, and one burlesque
   pantsing plot. (See illustration, top right.) Such incongruities
   contributed to Restoration comedy being held in low esteem in the 18th,
   19th and early 20th centuries, but today the early Restoration total
   theatre experience is again valued on the stage, as well as by
   postmodern academic critics.

   The unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley,
   and George Etherege reflected the atmosphere at Court, and celebrated
   with frankness an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual
   intrigue and conquest. The Earl of Rochester, real-life Restoration
   rake, courtier and poet, is flatteringly portrayed in Etherege's Man of
   Mode (1676) as a riotous, witty, intellectual, and sexually
   irresistible aristocrat, a template for posterity's idea of the
   glamorous Restoration rake (actually never a very common character in
   Restoration comedy). Wycherley's The Plain-Dealer (1676), a variation
   on the theme of Molière's Le misanthrope, was highly regarded for its
   uncompromising satire and earned Wycherley the appellation "Plain
   Dealer" Wycherley or "Manly" Wycherley, after the play's main character
   Manly. The single play that does most to support the charge of
   obscenity levelled then and now at Restoration comedy is probably
   Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675).
   William Wycherley, The Country Wife: "O Lord, I'll have some china too.
   Good Master Horner, don't think to give other people china, and me
   none. Come in with me too."
   William Wycherley, The Country Wife: "O Lord, I'll have some china too.
   Good Master Horner, don't think to give other people china, and me
   none. Come in with me too."

Example. William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675):

   The Country Wife has three interlinked but distinct plots, which each
   project sharply different moods:

   1. Horner's impotence trick provides the main plot and the play's
   organizing principle. The upper-class town rake Horner mounts a
   campaign for seducing as many respectable ladies as possible, first
   spreading a false rumour of his own impotence, in order to be allowed
   where no complete man may go. The trick is a great success and Horner
   has sex with many married ladies of virtuous reputation, whose husbands
   are happy to leave him alone with them. In one famously outrageous
   scene, the "China scene", sexual intercourse is assumed to take place
   repeatedly just off stage, where Horner and his mistresses carry on a
   sustained double entendre dialogue purportedly about Horner's china
   collection. The Country Wife is driven by a succession of
   near-discoveries of the truth about Horner's sexual prowess (and thus
   the truth about the respectable ladies), from which he extricates
   himself by quick thinking and good luck. Horner never becomes a
   reformed character, but keeps his secret to the end and is assumed to
   go on merrily reaping the fruits of his planted misinformation, past
   the last act and beyond.

   2. The married life of Pinchwife and Margery is based on Molière's
   School For Wives. Pinchwife is a middle-aged man who has married an
   ignorant young country girl in the hope that she will not know to
   cuckold him. However, Horner teaches her, and Margery cuts a swathe
   through the sophistications of London marriage without even noticing
   them. She is enthusiastic about the virile handsomeness of town
   gallants, rakes, and especially theatre actors (such self-referential
   stage jokes were nourished by the new higher status of actors), and
   keeps Pinchwife in a state of continual horror with her
   plain-spokenness and her interest in sex. A running joke is the way
   Pinchwife's pathological jealousy always leads him into supplying
   Margery with the very type of information he wishes her not to have.

   3. The courtship of Harcourt and Alithea is a comparatively uplifting
   love story in which the witty Harcourt wins the hand of Pinchwife's
   sister Alithea.

Decline of comedy, 1678–90

   When the two companies were amalgamated in 1682 and the London stage
   became a monopoly, both the number and the variety of new plays being
   written dropped sharply. There was a swing away from comedy to serious
   political drama, reflecting preoccupations and divisions following on
   the Popish Plot (1678) and the Exclusion Crisis (1682). The few
   comedies produced also tended to be political in focus, the whig
   dramatist Thomas Shadwell sparring with the tories John Dryden and
   Aphra Behn. Behn's unique achievement as an early professional woman
   writer has been the subject of much recent study.

Comedy renaissance, 1690–1700

   During the second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer"
   comedies of William Congreve and John Vanbrugh reflected mutating
   cultural perceptions and great social change. The playwrights of the
   1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong
   middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving
   the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of
   marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the
   older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells.
   Thomas Southerne's dark The Wives' Excuse (1691) is not yet very
   "soft": it shows a woman miserably married to the fop Friendall,
   everybody's friend, whose follies and indiscretions undermine her
   social worth, since her honour is bound up in his. Mrs Friendall is
   pursued by a would-be lover, a matter-of-fact rake devoid of all the
   qualities that made Etherege's Dorimant charming, and she is kept from
   action and choice by the unattractiveness of all her options. All the
   humour of this "comedy" is in the subsidiary love-chase and fornication
   plots, none in the main plot.

   In Congreve's Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), the
   "wit duels" between lovers typical of 1670s comedy are underplayed. The
   give-and-take set pieces of couples still testing their attraction for
   each other have mutated into witty prenuptial debates on the eve of
   marriage, as in the famous "Proviso" scene in The Way of the World
   (1700). Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife (1697) follows in the footsteps of
   Southerne's Wives' Excuse, with a lighter touch and more humanly
   recognizable characters.

Example. John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife (1697):

   John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife: "These are good times. A woman may
   have a gallant and a separate maintenance too."
   Enlarge
   John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife: "These are good times. A woman may
   have a gallant and a separate maintenance too."

   The Provoked Wife is something of a Restoration problem play in its
   attention to the subordinate legal position of married women and the
   complexities of "divorce" and separation, issues that had been
   highlighted in the mid-1690s by some notorious cases before the House
   of Lords (see Stone).

   Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife is tired of matrimony. He comes
   home drunk every night and is continually rude and insulting to his
   wife. She is meanwhile being tempted to embark upon an affair with the
   witty and faithful Constant. Divorce is not an option for either of the
   Brutes at this time, but forms of legal separation have recently come
   into existence, and would entail a separate maintenance to the wife.
   Such an arrangement would not allow remarriage. Still, muses Lady
   Brute, in one of many discussions with her niece Bellinda, "These are
   good times. A woman may have a gallant and a separate maintenance too."

   Bellinda is at the same time being grumpily courted by Constant's
   friend Heartfree, who is surprised and dismayed to find himself in love
   with her. The bad example of the Brutes is a constant warning to
   Heartfree to not marry.

   The Provoked Wife is a talk play, with the focus less on love scenes
   and more on discussions between female friends (Lady Brute and
   Bellinda) and male friends (Constant and Heartfree). These exchanges,
   full of jokes though they are, are thoughtful and have a dimension of
   melancholy and frustration.

   After a forged-letter complication, the play ends with marriage between
   Heartfree and Bellinda and stalemate between the Brutes. Constant
   continues to pay court to Lady Brute, and she continues to
   shilly-shally.

End of comedy

   The tolerance for Restoration comedy even in its modified form was
   running out at the end of the 17th century, as public opinion turned to
   respectability and seriousness even faster than the playwrights did.
   Interconnected causes for this shift in taste were demographic change,
   the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William's and Mary's dislike of the
   theatre, and the lawsuits brought against playwrights by the Society
   for the Reformation of Manners (founded in 1692). When Jeremy Collier
   attacked Congreve and Vanbrugh in his Short View of the Immorality and
   Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698, he was confirming a shift in
   audience taste that had already taken place. At the much-anticipated
   all-star première in 1700 of The Way of the World, Congreve's first
   comedy for five years, the audience showed only moderate enthusiasm for
   that subtle and almost melancholy work. The comedy of sex and wit was
   about to be replaced by the drama of obvious sentiment and exemplary
   morality.

After Restoration comedy

Stage history

   During the 18th and 19th centuries, the sexual frankness of Restoration
   comedy ensured that theatre producers cannibalised it or adapted it
   with a heavy hand, rather than actually performed it. Today,
   Restoration comedy is again appreciated on the stage. The classics,
   Wycherley's The Country Wife and The Plain-Dealer, Etherege's The Man
   of Mode, and Congreve's Love For Love and The Way of the World have
   competition not only from Vanbrugh's The Relapse and The Provoked Wife,
   but from such dark unfunny comedies as Thomas Southerne's The Wives
   Excuse. Aphra Behn, once considered unstageable, has had a major
   renaissance, with The Rover now a repertory favourite.

Literary criticism

   Distaste for sexual impropriety long kept Restoration comedy not only
   off the stage but also locked in a critical poison cupboard. Victorian
   critics like William Hazlitt, although valuing the linguistic energy
   and "strength" of the canonical writers Etherege, Wycherley, and
   Congreve, always found it necessary to temper aesthetic praise with
   heavy moral condemnation. Aphra Behn received the condemnation without
   the praise, since outspoken sex comedy was considered particularly
   offensive coming from a woman author. At the turn of the 20th century,
   an embattled minority of academic Restoration comedy enthusiasts began
   to appear, for example the important editor Montague Summers, whose
   work ensured that the plays of Aphra Behn remained in print.

   "Critics remain astonishingly defensive about the masterpieces of this
   period", wrote Robert D. Hume as late as 1976. It is only over the last
   few decades that that statement has become untrue, as Restoration
   comedy has been acknowledged a rewarding subject for high theory
   analysis and Wycherley's The Country Wife, long branded the most
   obscene play in the English language, has become something of an
   academic favourite. "Minor" comic writers are getting a fair share of
   attention, especially the post-Aphra Behn generation of women
   playwrights which appeared just around the turn of the 18th century:
   Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Susannah Centlivre.
   A broad study of the majority of never-reprinted Restoration comedies
   has been made possible by Internet access (by subscription only) to the
   first editions at the British Library.

List of notable Restoration comedies

   The Rover by Aphra Behn is now a repertory favourite.
   Enlarge
   The Rover by Aphra Behn is now a repertory favourite.
     * Charles Sedley, The Mulberry-garden (1668)
     * George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal (1671)
     * John Dryden, Marriage-A-la-Mode (1672)
     * William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675), The Plain-Dealer (1676)
     * George Etherege, Love in a Tub (1664), The Man of Mode (1676)
     * Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677), The Roundheads (1681), The Rover,
       Part II (1681), The Lucky Chance (1686)
     * Thomas Shadwell, Bury Fair (1689)
     * Thomas Southerne, Sir Anthony Love (1690), The Wives Excuse (1691)
     * William Congreve, The Old Bachelor (1693), Love For Love (1695),
       The Way of the World (1700)
     * John Vanbrugh, The Relapse (1696), The Provoked Wife (1697)
     * George Farquhar, Love and a Bottle (1698), The Constant Couple
       (1699), Sir Harry Wildair (1701), The Recruiting Officer (1706),
       The Beaux' Stratagem (1707)
     * Susannah Centlivre, The Perjured Husband (1700), The Basset-Table,
       (1705), The Busie Body (1709)

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