Marriage and the Comedy of the 1690s — Dryden’s Amphitryon and Crowne’s The Married Beau

Abstract

The court ethos I have discussed as the product of the last two reigns was irrelevant to the next. The terms on which William and Mary acceded to the throne created a less dazzling image of monarchy, an image that their individual personalities did everything to confirm. Neither was interested in the stage, and Mary in particular was concerned to reform the moral climate in a way that may well have eventually killed off comedy as Charles II had known it.¹ That it not only survived into the reign of her sister Anne, but produced as many masterpieces in a dozen years as it had before testifies to a brief independence of fashion. It had become an established literary form, to be taken up confidently by a new generation of dramatists after so many of the old had died, gone into exile or simply stopped regular production.