The School for Scandal: The Restoration Unrestored

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (4-Part-1) ◽  
pp. 694-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Schiller
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  
Comedy Of Manners ◽  
Restoration Comedy

Evocation of the spirit of a former age is one of the surest ways to demonstrate that the past can never be the present. Sheridan, in writing The School for Scandal, made an excursion into the Restoration, an act of literary nostalgia, and a recognition, perhaps, that he had been born a century too late. His purpose was clear: to write a neo-Restoration high comedy of manners. That he achieved it outwardly is certain. That he succeeded in resurrecting the spirit is a question—one which raises still another question: wherein lies the “spirit” of Restoration comedy?

The “Character” in Restoration Comedy

PMLA ◽  
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.

"Préciosité" and the Restoration Comedy of Manners

1955 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Berkeley
Keyword(s):  
Comedy Of Manners ◽  
Restoration Comedy

Rescuing Horace, Pyrrha and Aphra Behn: A Directive

Ramus ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-77
Author(s):  
Rosemary M. Nielsen ◽  
Robert H. Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Robert Frost ◽  
Classical Scholar ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Comedy Of Manners ◽  
Almost All

The question before us at the turn of both century and millennium is how one determines whether Horace is a dangerous love-poet (unrecognised because we read badly). Or a panderer, playing to our delight in the comedy of manners. Or a serious analyst of communication between the sexes—even a prophet for our time. The choice varies from villain to vates, the extremes reminding us how certainly the past exists, as Robert Frost laments in ‘Directive’: ‘Back in a time made simple by the loss/Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off,/Like a graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.’Recently, a Classical scholar, writing about what she termed ‘Horace's detachment as a love poet’, asserted that his readers ‘remain trapped, perhaps by necessity, in male assumptions about desire that they are unable to question.’ She believes that there is a ‘disturbing picture of love and desire’ which critics have missed because we read, almost all of us, with half-closed eyes, ignoring ‘erotic subterfuge’ in the love-odes. We overlook, she insists, ‘the overpowering desire’ of the male ‘poet/lover’ because, in ‘unacknowledged identification’ with Horace, we put on Horatian eyes. This charge raises disquieting questions about distinctions between speaker and poet, persona and historical figure, art and life.

Crabbed Age and Youth. The Old Men and Women in the Restoration Comedy of Manners

1949 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 111
Author(s):  
V. de S. Pinto ◽  
Elisabeth Mignon ◽  
Erwin Weide
Keyword(s):  
Men And Women ◽  
Comedy Of Manners ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
Old Men

Theophrastus'Charactersand the historian

1997 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 127-170
Author(s):  
R. J. Lane Fox
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Young Age ◽  
Total Absence ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
Recent Attention

In a programmatic article, published nearly twenty years ago, Peter Laslett characterized historians who try to write social history from literature as people who look at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. His particular examples of their inverted gaze were not always well chosen: warfare in Homer, the young age at betrothal of Shakespeare's Juliet, the extra-marital affairs in Restoration Comedy. The main point, however, still challenges ancient historians. ‘The great defect of the evidence’, as A. H. M. Jones forewarned readers of his social history, ‘is the total absence of statistics’: at best, we have isolated numbers which do not survive in significant sequences. Yet since 1951, ancient historians have continued to look down their telescopes and find social history in a widening range of texts. In the past decade, Roman historians have re-read prose fictions for this purpose, while on the Greek side, more recent attention has gone to poetry, especially tragedy and Homeric epic.

Observations of the continuum near the galactic centre

1967 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 405
Author(s):  
F. J. Kerr
Keyword(s):  
Galactic Centre ◽  
The Past ◽  
Centre Region ◽  
The Continuum

A continuum survey of the galactic-centre region has been carried out at Parkes at 20 cm wavelength over the areal11= 355° to 5°,b11= -3° to +3° (Kerr and Sinclair 1966, 1967). This is a larger region than has been covered in such surveys in the past. The observations were done as declination scans.

The Origin of the Moon and its Relationship to the Origin of the Solar System

1962 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 133-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold C. Urey
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Origin Of The Moon

During the last 10 years, the writer has presented evidence indicating that the Moon was captured by the Earth and that the large collisions with its surface occurred within a surprisingly short period of time. These observations have been a continuous preoccupation during the past years and some explanation that seemed physically possible and reasonably probable has been sought.

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