The Moral Reform Movement, Love’s Last Shift and Changing Sensibilities

Abstract

Theatre in the period immediately after the Restoration was strongly supported by Charles II and his Court. The two men, Killigrew and D’Avenant, who were awarded the new theatrical patents had been exiled in France with Charles, and the titles of the companies they formed, the King’s and the Duke’s, bore testament to the strong links. It is no surprise, then, that the plays that were performed by these companies reflected the values of the world of the Court and its environs. But they did so in ways that are more complicated than is now generally perceived for this period of theatrical history. We are now accustomed to thinking of the period almost entirely in terms of its comedies, but the variety of theatrical models on offer was initially much wider than that, and indeed the play with which D’Avenant introduced his Duke’s Company, The Siege of Rhodes (1661), was the first of many heroic plays of the period, a form of drama described by Harbage as being preoccupied with a notion of virtue that was ‘purely aristocratic, limiting the quality to the traits of epic heroes: physical courage, prowess in arms, magnanimity, and fidelity to a code of personal honour’.¹