Restoration Comedy

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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 theaters in 1660 signaled a rebirth of English
drama. What would emerge from this period would be one of the greatest epochs in the history of
the English theater, though it would be completely unlike the Jacobean and Elizabethan dramas
which had preceded it. In the first half of the seventeenth century, tragedies, such as those penned
by Shakespeare and Marlowe, were the dominant form of drama for serious playwrights.
Comedies, while popular, were seen as a secondary literary form. However, in the wake of the
bloodshed and trauma of the Restoration, comedy was much needed and it would become far and
away the most popular form of drama and literature for nearly half a century.

The era of Restoration Comedy is seen as the high point for literary freedom of expression in
monarchial England. Censorship, under Charles II's reign, was loosened. By the mid-
seventeenth century, the opinions and moral climate of the English public were, like those on the
rest of the European continent, beginning to change. Playwrights in the Restoration period were
able to write about romance, courtship, marriage, and sex in ways that had previously been
inconceivable, and the result was one of the more libertine/ being free from sexual
restraint, excessively lustful/ periods in English literary history. While decidedly ribald at
times, the Restoration was nonetheless a major turning point in the history not only of the English
stage, but also of European comedy in general. The stately comedies of the French theater, such as
those written by Jean-Baptiste Molière, and the comedies of manners of the Elizabethan period
would give way to an entirely novel (and at times, strikingly modern) type of performance.

Although it would come to an abrupt end at the dawn of the eighteenth century, the Restoration
theater's attitudes would influence the writings of virtually every major playwright, poet, and
novelist writing in English for the next hundred years. The Restoration theater in many ways marks
the transition in English literature from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, and,
subsequently, serves as one of the turning points from the Renaissance to The
Enlightenment.Contents [hide]
1 Theater companies
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1.1 Original patent companies, 1660–82
1.2 United Company, 1682–95
1.3 War of the theatres, 1695–1700
2 Actors
2.1 First actresses
2.2 First celebrity actors
3 Comedies
3.1 Aristocratic comedy, 1660–80
3.1.1 Example. William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675):
3.2 Decline of comedy, 1678–90
3.3 Comedy renaissance, 1690–1700
3.3.1 Example. John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife (1697):
3.4 End of Restoration comedy
4 After Restoration comedy
4.1 Stage history
4.2 Literary criticism
5 List of notable Restoration comedies
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links
9 Credits

Theater 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).

Charles II was an active and interested patron of 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 a necessity for economic survival before any new plays could be
written. Their next priority was to build new, splendid patent theaters in Drury Lane and Dorset
Gardens, respectively. Striving to outdo each other in magnificence, Killigrew and Davenant ended
up with quite similar theaters, both designed by Christopher Wren. Both theaters 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 English 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

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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 favor, 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 absorbed 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 1680s, 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

A young United Company employee, Colley Cibber, explained the situation. The company owners,
she wrote, "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
endeavoring 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 walked out in protest.

The actors gained a Royal "license 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 (negatively
famous))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 theater company in London, were not above retaliating with
"prologues recited by boys of five, and epilogues declaimed by ladies on horseback" (Dobrée, xxi).
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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 favor.

Actors
First actresses

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 theaters, prepubescent boys had played all
of the female roles, and the predominantly male audiences of the 1660s and 1670s were curious, censorious, and delighted at the novelty of seeing real women engage in
. Samuel Pepys refers many times in his famous diary to visiting
risqué repartee and take part in physical seduction scenes

the playhouse in order to watch or re-watch the performance of some particular actress, and to how
much he enjoyed 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.)

A new specialty introduced almost as early as the actresses was the breeches role, which called for
an actress to appear in male clothes (breeches were tight-fitting knee-length pants, the standard
male garment of the time) 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 Gwynn, 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 1690s. 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.

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 were
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attracted to performances by the talents of their favorite actors as much as by the play itself.
Authors were relatively unimportant (as no performance was advertised by author until 1699).
Although the playhouses were built for large audiences—the second Drury Lane theatre from 1674
held two thousand 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
actors' rebellion and formation of a new company in 1695 illustrates 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 whom were active in
organizing the actors' revolt in 1695 and both original patent-holders in the resulting actors'
cooperative.

Betterton played every great male part from 1660 into the eighteenth century. After watching his
portrayal of 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 headed the actors' walkout in 1695, becoming the acting
manager of the new company.

Comedies
Variety and dizzying fashion changes are typical of Restoration comedy. There was a rapid
evolution of English drama over these forty years based partly on social and political causes,
partly on theater company competition and playhouse economics.

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 blossomed, 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

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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 vitalized by the competition between the two patent
companies created at the Restoration and the creation of new plays, as well as by the personal
interest shown by Charles II. 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 Jean-Baptiste 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 a low opinion of Restoration comedy
during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but today the early Restoration total
theater experience is again valued on the stage, as well as by postmodern academic critics.

1. 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, earning 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 leveled 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."

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 rumor 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

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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 how 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 theater 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/ combined/ 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/ obsession, fixation; thought that is constantly on one's mind moi ban tam/ and divisions
following 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
honor is bound up with his. Mrs Friendall is pursued by a would-be lover, a matter-of-fact rake

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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 humor 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 setpieces 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."

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 Restoration comedy

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The tolerance for Restoration comedy even in its modified form
was running out at the end of the seventeenth 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 theater, 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 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sexual frankness of Restoration comedy
ensured that theater producers cannibalized it or adapted it with a heavy hand, rather than actually
performing 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 also 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 favorite.

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 twentieth 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 this statement no longer appears to
be true, 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 favorite. "Minor" comic writers are getting a fair
share of attention, especially the post-Aphra Behn generation of women playwrights which
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appeared just around the turn of the eighteenth 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 (unfortunately by subscription only) to the
first editions at the British Library.

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