FEATURES OF RESTORATION DRAMA (GROUP 7)

FEATURES OF RESTORATION DRAMA

Theaters were closed during the puritan period. During the restoration, they re-opened with new types of plays and performances which were different than before. The theaters which were indoor were much smaller than the Elizabethan ones. They didn’t have a platform but there was a picture frame stage with different sceneries. The lighting was artificial and the actors would enter from the side. The audience was of middlemen and upper class people. Most of the features of restoration drama is seen even today.

A typical type of restoration drama was the heroic play. These plays were called “tragedies” or “histories” but Dryden termed these plays as “Heroic drama”. These plays were written in the classical model of the rhymed heroic couplet and later in blank verse. This drama was of tragic comedy, where there would be a happy ending. The heroes and heroines would show great strength and nobility. This would create admiration by the audience. The plays would make people wonder and also excite the imagination. The rhymed verses elevated the play above everyday reality to grandeur. There is a hero, heroine and villain. The villain is the dominating character from 1660 onwards, the plays were male dominated but in the 1670s and 1680s the focus shifted from hero to heroine.

The success of the plays of the Restoration period is dependent on exotic staging devices, strange plots and exaggerated language. Heroic dramas of the time abound in allusions to the political crises of the polish plot, the bill of exclusion and the revolution of 1688. In the eighteenth century revival of heroic drama was attempted but it was not successful.

~Written by Lovanxa Gomes (1313260); Edited by Srishti Banerjee (1313287)

Group 7