RESTORATION COMEDY (GROUP 7)

RESTORATION COMEDY

Restoration comedy is well-known for its sexual distinctiveness and was encouraged by Charles II and his jaunty aristocratic ethos of his court. This period saw the first professional woman playwright,Aphra Behn. The well-known plays of the early restoration period are the ''hard' comedies of William Wycherley, George Etherege, and John Dryden. Those comedies echoed the atmosphere at court, and represented virile lifestyle of unceasing sexual fascination and conquest. The Earl of Rochester, real-life Restoration decadent, courtier and poet, and is portrayed in Etherege's Man of Mode (1676) as a riotous, intellectual, and sexually irresistible patrician, a model for future generations. Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1676), was highly considered for its unbending satire. It earned Wycherly the denomination ''Plain Dealer" Wycherley or "Manly'' Wycherey, after the plays important character Manly. During the Restoration period in 1690s, the ''softer" comedies of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve mirrored mutating cultural comprehensions and social change. These playwrights written in the 1960s were to attract socially diverse audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female audience, for example by including the differences between the sexes from the arena of fascination into that of marriage. The socially diverse audiences included both patricians, their servants and the middle-class. These common audiences were attracted to the comedies by crowded and bustling plots, by the introduction of the first professional actresses, and by the rise of the first celebrity actors. It focuses on marital relations after the wedding rather than young lovers outwitting the older generation. Restoration literature had a bad reputation for three centuries. The "inappropriate" mixing of comedy and tragedy beloved by Restoration audiences was denounced. The Victorians decried restoration comedies as too obscene for the stage.

~ Written by Taniya George (1313251)

Group 7