The Last Restoration Comedies — Farquhar, Centlivre and Steele

Abstract

Restoration comedy was informed by facts of social life which had begun by the end of the seventeenth century to modify ahead of the form’s intrinsic energy. The ‘end’ of Restoration comedy is simply the falling away of the contingencies that had shaped it. George Farquhar, on whom the beginning of this chapter will concentrate, can seem to be a transitional figure; it is certainly true that his work spans a distinct change in comic styles, from the ‘artificial’ style of the Etheregean revival, superficially fashionable, but crucially distant from real ‘manners’, to a realist comedy of broader social scope and robustly moral intention. But, like so much in the history of a genre, this seems a general change, not the result of any individual author’s innovation. Through the chinks in a disintegrating comic ethos the playwrights begin to perceive a world elsewhere. Farquhar steps decisively into it; his last two plays look back to London comedy from a firm footing in new territory. His last play, The Beaux Strategem (1707), offers in addition his most elegant and lucid statement of an ideological shift equally central to the transformation of ‘Restoration’ comedy into a form expressive of recognisably eighteenth-century concerns; the growing importance of a concept of ‘law’.