Comedy of Wit

Term for a type of Restoration Comedy (written between c. 1668 to 1710 in England) (sometimes also known as "Comedy of Manners"). It is a comedy in prose that is often set in urban London (famous exception: Behn's The Rover which is set in Naples, Italy), in a park or appartments and salons. The cast usually consists of a group of young people that seek pleasure. They stem from fashionable families and their ultimate goal is personal fulfilment. They receive opposition from ridiculed or satirised character-types such as old fathers and mothers, hypocritical Puritans or stupid country bumpkins. Sexual explicitness is one of the main characteristics of a comedy of wit. Restoration comedy inverts or parodies the conventions of pastoral intrigue. Nevertheless, "Restoration comedy is to be distinguished from its two rival forms of intrigue play - the 'Spanish' play and the tragi-comic romance - not simply by its insistence on a contemporary London setting, but by the social and psychological contingencies that accrue from this limited and apparently contradictory claim on the real" (Burns 14-15).

The term "wit" that classifies this type of plays is "the ability to use social and linguistic artifice for personal ends" (ibid. 17). Wit "overrides 'decorum' - the affirmation of an intrinsically self-righting social order - and thus the plays reach their endings on kinds of contracts, not on an order re-discovered, presumed to have been somehow always 'there' and hence presented as natural" (ibid.)

Critics point out that the comedy of wit has been influenced by the comedy by the French playwright Molière (1622-1673) (see Knutson, for example).

There are basically three stages of Restoration comedy. The first evolution of the Comedy of Wit can be dated to the period from 1660 to 1680. Sir George Etherege (c. 1635-1692) and William Wycherley were amongst the first writers of Restoration comedy. The second phase took place during the Royalist crisis in the 1680s. Here, Restoration comedy was adapted by professional writers such as John Dryden and Aphra Behn. The last phase is often labelled a "revival" (Burns 18), which took place between 1690 and 1700 after the accession of William of Orange. Thomas Southerne (1660-1746), William Congreve and John Vanbrugh were among the leading playwrights of this period.

Examples of Restoration Comedy

William Wycherley: The Country Wife (1675)
William Wycherley: The Plain Dealer (1676)
George Etherege: The Man of Mode (1676)
Aphra Behn: The Rover (1677)
William Congreve: Love For Love (1695)
William Congreve: The Way of the World (1700)

Sources

Burns, Edward. Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Knutson, Harold C. The Triumph of Wit: Molière and Restoration Comedy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988.