Editing Stuart Restoration (section)

===Comedy===
{{Main|Restoration comedy}}
Comedy, especially bawdy comedy, flourished, and a favourite setting was the bed-chamber.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Webster |first=Jeremy W. |date=2012 |title=In and Out of the Bed-chamber: Staging Libertine Desire in Restoration Comedy |journal=Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studie |pages=77–96}}</ref> Indeed, sexually explicit language was encouraged by the king personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian [[George Norman Clark]] argues:

{{Blockquote|The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper....The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Clark |first=George |author-link=George Norman Clark |title=The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714 |date=1956 |pages=369}}</ref>}}

The socially diverse audiences included both aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on, and a substantial middle-class segment.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Love |first=Harold |date=1986 |title=Who Were the Restoration Audience? |journal=The Yearbook of English Studies |volume=10 |pages=21–40}}</ref> These playgoers were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, by crowded and bustling plots, by the introduction of the first professional actresses, and by the rise of the first celebrity actors. This period saw the first professional female playwright, [[Aphra Behn]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Dobrée |first=Bonamy |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZhlaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA9 |title=Restoration Comedy, 1660–1720 |date=1924 |publisher=Oxford University Press |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200818161818/https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=lang_en&id=ZhlaAAAAMAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=%22Restoration+style%22+severity+england+puritanism&ots=7XVt96Cwd9&sig=4_EZpAi3tZTsT9Sh-iySC9T1nKE |archive-date=18 August 2020}}</ref>