Abstract
To use the term ‘Restoration comedy’ is to posit the direct relationship of a historical event to a literary form. It is to suggest that this particular dramatic genre is characterized by its relation to social and political change. Otherwise the term has no meaning. If we are to continue to use it, we must establish whether this is so. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 established a new court and new social forms. It could not however ‘restore’ the ideologies and social structures of the pre-revolutionary period. Restoration culture is a compromise, often uneasy, sometimes poised, an anxious and contradictory endeavour to create traditions and celebrate newness. We expect plays to ‘register’ the ‘tone’ of their period. But can these plays be said to be shaped by theirs? Are they sufficiently distinct from other plays and sufficiently like each other to constitute a literary genre?
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Notes
William Van Lennep (ed.) The London Stage 1660–1800 (Carbondale Illinois, 1965), Part 1 1660–1700, p. xxxvi.
Thora Burnley Jones and Bernard de Bear Nicol, Neo-classical Dramatic Criticism 1560–1770 (Cambridge, 1976) pp. 13–17 and passim.
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Jean Robertson (ed.), The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford, 1973) p. 56, 11.119–24.
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David Piper, The English Face (London, 1957) ch. v, p. 130.
R. B. McKerrow (ed.), The Works of Thomas Nashe (London, 1904) n pp. 328–4, 317.
C. F. Tucker Brooke (ed.), The Works of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 1910), p. 289, Act IV, ll.1800–16.
John Shearman, Mannerism (London, 1967) p. 92.
Walter F. Staton Jnr. and William E. Simeone, A Critical Edition of Sir Richard Fanshawe’s 1647 Translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s IL PASTOR FIDO (Oxford, 1964 ) pp. 4–5.
James Turner, The Politics of Landscape (Oxford, 1979) p. 27.
Quoted in Antonia Fraser, King Charles II (London, 1979) p. 154.
Ghosh (ed.), The Works of Thomas Otway vol. 11 (Oxford, 1932) p. 472, ll. 26–30.
David M. Vieth (ed.), The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (New Haven, 1968) p. 41, ll.21–2.
Richard Flecknoe, Love’s Kingdom: a Pastoral Trage Comedy; with a Short Treatise of the English Stage, etc. by the same Author (London, 1664).
Montagne Summers, (ed.), The Works of Thomas Shadwell vol. 1, (London, 1927) p. 125 II.
See William Gaunt, Court Painting in England (London, 1980) pp. 144–5.
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© 1987 Edward Burns
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Burns, E. (1987). Introduction. In: Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18760-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18760-7_1
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