Critics, Values, and Restoration Comedy

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

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Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women's Desire, Deception, and Agency by Peggy Thompson (review)

Restoration Studies in English Literary Culture 1660-1700 ◽

10.1353/rst.2013.0003 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 37 (1) ◽

pp. 80-82

Author(s):

Jennifer L. Airey

Keyword(s):

Restoration Comedy

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The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy

10.4324/9780429054150 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Kathleen M. Lynch

Keyword(s):

The Social ◽

Restoration Comedy

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The Sentimental Mask

PMLA ◽

10.2307/460730 ◽

1963 ◽

Vol 78 (5) ◽

pp. 529-535 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Paul E. Parnell

Keyword(s):

The Self ◽

Recent Developments ◽

Adequate Definition ◽

Restoration Comedy

Fifty years after the modern study of sentimentalism was inaugurated by Ernest Bernbaum, the problem remains whether the term has ever been satisfactorily defined or described. Two recent developments reveal some of the difficulties: Arthur Sherbo in The English Sentimental Drama takes five basic criteria considered by most authorities as typical, and shows that they may all apply to plays demonstrably not sentimental. John Harrington Smith, in the preface to The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (1948), announces that he has completely avoided the term “sentimental” as too vague to be of much value. Yet Ronald Crane, writing fourteen years before, assumed the essential traits of sentimentalism to be fairly clear, and Norman Holland has implied that two criteria borrowed from Bernbaum and Krutch still supply an adequate definition. There is not even agreement whether sentimentality is a positive or negative quality. Krutch and Sherbo feel that it is false and dishonest, therefore bad. Crane concedes that it is somewhat limited intellectually, but emphasizes its humanitarianism and emotional warmth, especially the “self-approving joy” that makes virtue satisfying. Bernbaum vacillates between sympathy and contempt.

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The “Character” in Restoration Comedy

PMLA ◽

10.1632/457004 ◽

1915 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 64-78

Author(s):

Edward Chauncey Baldwin

Keyword(s):

Frequent Occurrence ◽

Comedy Of Manners ◽

Restoration Comedy ◽

Typical Instance

Every reader of the Restoration comedy of manners cannot fail to be impressed with the frequent occurrence of the character-sketch. Often this is of a typical personage having no part in the action, as when in Wycherley's Plain Dealer, Novel and Olivia together in dialogue form describe Lady Autumn, her daughter, and a fop, none of whom appears in the play. Again, one notices a marked use of the dramatic convention of making one actor describe another who is about to enter. A typical instance occurs in the scene just mentioned when Novel describes in the form of a “character,” Lord Plausible, and is interrupted by that gentleman's entrance.

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The Optics of Virtue in Boyle, Cowley, and Behn

The Curious Eye ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198850199.003.0007 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 163-191

Author(s):

Erin Webster

Keyword(s):

Royal Society ◽

Visual Control ◽

Close Reading ◽

The Moon ◽

Father Figure ◽

Women's Bodies ◽

Restoration Comedy ◽

Visual Engagement

This chapter reads Aphra Behn’s farcical play, The Emperor of the Moon (1687), as a sustained and engaged critique of the figure of the experimentalist ‘virtuoso’ as he is presented in defences of the Royal Society circulating in Restoration London. It begins with a close reading of the language of virtue in a series of Royal Society apologetics before turning to Behn’s play in order to show how Behn exposes the ironies present in the virtuoso’s claim to transcend sensual pleasures in pursuit of intellectual ones when measured against the sexually charged language with which these same self-proclaimed virtuosos describe their own experimental practices. By bringing the conventional controlling father figure of Restoration comedy together with the figure of the virtuoso, Behn’s play reveals the extent to which the latter was dependent upon a gendered rhetoric of voyeurism and visual control. At the same time, she leverages the hypocrisy of the virtuoso’s claims to virtuous viewership in order to question other forms of patriarchal authority over women’s bodies and women’s desires. The chapter concludes with a reading of Behn’s poem ‘On a Juniper Tree’ (1684) as an imaginative work that presents a more ethical model of visual engagement with feminine and natural bodies.

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