Restoration Comedy

Restoration Comedy is sometimes also referred to as artificial comedy or comedy of manners, and earlier also as Old comedy. Usually restoration comedy is a term which is used for the kind of drama between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the beginning of the sentimental comedy at the beginning of the 18th century.

Comedy

A comedy is usually a play, written to amuse its audience, often by appealing to a sense of superiority over the depicted characters. It usually describes things which are much closer to everyday life and manners than those which are described in a tragedy. Consequently, it explores more common human failings and misbehaviour rather than the catastrophes which are typical for tragedies. The ending is usually happy.

Restoration Comedy

Restoration comedies refer to the time of the Restoration or at least close to it. They mainly present "a society of elegance and stylishness" (Cuddon, 743). In addition, they feature stereotypes of the period, such as ladies and gentlemen of fashion and rank, fops (= followers of fashion) and rakes (= male characters with a developed sex-drive), gallants, and country bumpkins (= someone from the country) as well as social climbers. The main topic is the complexity of sexual as well as of marital intrigue (the game of love, so to say) and thus they often deal with adultery and cheating. The plots are often represented by using sophisticated repartee and the knowledge of the right behaviour and manners of the society.

The characters can often be divided according to two social groups. There are characters that belong to the young aristocrats. Those are usually able to behave according to the social norms, as they know them very well and understand how to manipulate them as well. The other group of characters are the social "upstarts" who come from the middle-class and try to belong to the upper-class but often fail and expose themselves by a series of blunders. Although this opposition between aristocrats and citizens holds true for some comedies, the more general pattern juxtaposes in-group and out-group irrespective of their class, more dependent on following the right lifestyle. And one of the standard happy endings is the marriage between the daughter of a citizen and the male protagonist.

The main purpose of this comedies is to mock society. This could have caused negative as well as positive audience responses. If the play was successful, the audience laughed and left the theatres with a good feeling.

If we can say that the comedies somehow mirror society, some plays show rather a dark and sombre view. Some of the description of marriage are quite crushing. Even if the ends are happy and the man usually gets the woman in the end, we can find marriages and love affairs without love and that break with all the known traditions of the time.

Main Authors and Works

William Congreve

• The Double Dealer (1694)

• Love for Love (1695)

• The Way of the World (1700)

George Etherege

• The Man of Mode (1676)

George Farquhar

• The Recruiting Officer (1706)

• The Beaux' Stratagem(1707)

John Vanbrugh

• The Relapse (1697)

• The Provoked Wife (1697)

William Wycherley

• The Country Wife (publ. 1675)

• The Plain Dealer (publ. 1677)

References

• Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: OUP, 1990.
• Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
• Lombardi, Esther. "The Evolution of the Restoration Comedy. This English version of the comedy of manners." ThoughtCo.com, last updated 7 August 2017, http://classiclit.about.com/cs/articles/a/aa_restoration.htm.