Editing Restoration comedy (section)

==Comedies==
Variety and dizzying fashion changes are typical of Restoration comedy. Though the "Restoration drama" unit taught to college students is likely to be telescoped in a way that makes the plays all sound contemporary, scholars now have a strong sense of the rapid evolution of English drama over these 40 years and its social and political causes. The influence of theatre-company competition and playhouse economics is also acknowledged.

[[File:John Lacy by John Michael Wright 1668-70.png|thumb|upright|[[John Lacy (playwright)|John Lacy]] was the favourite comic of King Charles II.]]
Restoration comedy peaked twice. The genre came to marked maturity in the mid-1670s with an extravaganza of [[aristocracy|aristocratic]] comedies. Twenty lean years followed this short golden age, though the achievement of [[Aphra Behn]] in the 1680s can be noted. In the mid-1690s a brief second Restoration comedy renaissance arose, aimed at a wider audience. The comedies of the golden 1670s and 1690s peak times are extremely different from each other. An attempt is made below to illustrate the generational taste shift by describing ''The Country Wife'' (1675) and ''The Provoked Wife'' (1697) in some detail. The two plays differ in some typical ways, just as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s differs from one of the 1970s. The plays are not, however, offered as "typical" of their decades. Indeed, there exist no typical comedies of the 1670s or the 1690s; even within these two short peak-times, comedy types kept mutating and multiplying.

===Aristocratic comedy, 1660–1680===
The drama of the 1660s and 1670s was vitalised by the competition between the two patent companies created at the Restoration, and by the personal interest of Charles II, while comic playwrights arose to the demand for new plays. They stole freely from the contemporary French and Spanish stage, from English [[James I of England|Jacobean]] and [[Charles I of England|Caroline]] plays, and even from [[Greek theatre|Greek]] and [[Theatre of ancient Rome|Roman]] [[Classics|classical]] comedies, combining the looted plotlines in adventurous ways. Resulting differences of tone in a single play were appreciated rather than frowned on: audiences prized "variety" within as well as between plays. Early Restoration audiences had little enthusiasm for structurally simple, well-shaped comedies such as those of [[Molière]]. They demanded bustling, crowded multi-plot action and fast pace. Even a splash of high heroic drama might be thrown in to enrich the comedy mix, as in [[George Etherege]]'s ''Love in a Tub'' (1664), which has one heroic verse "conflict between love and friendship" plot, one urbane wit comedy plot, and one burlesque pantsing plot. (''See illustration, top right''.) Such incongruities contributed to the low esteem held by Restoration comedy in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, whereas today such total theatre experience is again valued on the stage and by [[postmodern]] academic critics.

The unsentimental or "hard" comedies of [[John Dryden]], [[William Wycherley]], and [[George Etherege]] reflected the atmosphere at Court. They celebrated with frankness an aristocratic [[machismo|macho]] lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. The [[John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester|Earl of Rochester]], a real-life Restoration rake, courtier and poet, is flatteringly portrayed in Etherege's ''[[The Man of Mode]]'' (1676) as a riotous, witty, intellectual, sexually irresistible aristocrat, a template for posterity's idea of the glamorous Restoration rake (actually never a very common character in Restoration comedy). Wycherley's ''[[The Plain Dealer (play)|The Plain Dealer]]'' (1676), a variation on the theme of [[Molière]]'s ''[[Le Misanthrope]]'', was highly regarded for uncompromising satire and earned Wycherley the appellation "Plain Dealer" Wycherley or "Manly" Wycherley, after the play's main character Manly. The single play that does most to support the charge of [[obscenity]] levelled then and now at Restoration comedy is probably Wycherley's ''[[The Country Wife]]'' (1675). 
[[Image:William Wycherley.png|thumb|upright|[[William Wycherley]], ''[[The Country Wife]]'': "O Lord, I'll have some china too. Good Master Horner, don't think to give other people china, and me none. Come in with me too."]]

====Example. William Wycherley, ''The Country Wife'' (1675)====
''[[The Country Wife]]'' has three interlinked but distinct plots, which each project sharply different moods:

1. Horner's [[impotence]] trick provides the main plot and the organising principle. The upper-class rake Horner mounts a campaign to seduce as many respectable ladies as possible, first spreading a false rumour of his own impotence, so as to be allowed where no other men might go. The trick is a great success and Horner has sex with many married ladies of virtuous reputation, whose husbands are happy to leave them alone with him. In the famously outrageous "China scene", sexual intercourse is assumed to take place repeatedly just off stage, where Horner and his mistresses carry on a sustained [[double entendre]] [[dialogue]] purportedly about Horner's china collection. ''The Country Wife'' is driven by a succession of near-discoveries of the truth about Horner's sexual prowess (and so the truth about the respectable ladies), from which he extricates himself by quick thinking and luck. Horner never reforms, but keeps his secret to the end and is seen to go on merrily reaping the fruits of his planted misinformation past the last act and beyond.

2. The married life of Pinchwife and Margery draws on Molière's ''[[School for Wives]]''. Middle-aged Pinchwife has married an ignorant young country girl in the hope that she will not know to cuckold him. Horner teaches her, and Margery cuts a swathe through the sophistications of London marriage without even noticing them. She is enthusiastic about the virile handsomeness of town gallants, rakes, and especially theatre actors (such self-referential stage jokes were nourished by the new higher status of actors), and keeps Pinchwife in a state of continual horror with her plain-spokenness and interest in sex. A running joke is the way Pinchwife's [[pathological jealousy]] always leads him into supplying Margery with the very information he wishes her not to have.

3. The courtship of Harcourt and Alithea is a comparatively uplifting love story, in which the witty Harcourt wins the hand of Pinchwife's sister Alithea from the hands of the upper-class town snob Sparkish, to whom she was engaged until discovering he loved her only for her money.

===Decline of comedy, 1678–1690===
When the two companies merged in 1682 and the London stage became a monopoly, both the number and the variety of new plays dropped sharply. There was a swing away from comedy to serious political drama, reflecting preoccupations and divisions after the [[Popish Plot]] (1678) and [[Exclusion Crisis]] (1682). The few comedies produced tended to be political in focus, the [[British Whig Party|Whig]] dramatist [[Thomas Shadwell]] sparring with the [[Tories (British political party)|Tories]] [[John Dryden]] and [[Aphra Behn]]. Behn's achievement as an early professional woman writer has been the subject of much recent study.

===Comedy renaissance, 1690–1700===
During a second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer" comedies of [[William Congreve (playwright)|William Congreve]] and [[John Vanbrugh]] reflected mutating cultural perceptions and great social change. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells. [[Thomas Southerne]]'s dark ''[[The Wives' Excuse]]'' (1691) is not yet "soft": it shows a woman miserably married to the [[fop]] Friendall, everybody's friend, whose follies and indiscretions undermine her social worth, as her honour is bound up in his. Mrs Friendall is pursued by a would-be lover, a matter-of-fact rake devoid of all the qualities that made Etherege's Dorimant charming. She is kept from action and choice by the unattractiveness of all her options. The humour of this "comedy" is in the subsidiary love-chase and fornication plots, none in the main plot.

In Congreve's ''[[Love for Love]]'' (1695) and ''[[The Way of the World]]'' (1700), the  "wit duels" between lovers typical of 1670s comedy are underplayed. The give-and-take set pieces of couples still testing their attraction for each other have mutated into witty prenuptial debates on the eve of marriage, as in the famous "Proviso" scene in ''The Way of the World'' (1700). Vanbrugh's ''[[The Provoked Wife]]'' (1697) follows in the footsteps of Southerne's ''Wives' Excuse'', with a lighter touch and more humanly recognisable characters.

====Example. John Vanbrugh, ''The Provoked Wife'' (1697)====
[[Image:John Vanbrugh.jpg|thumb|upright|[[John Vanbrugh]], ''[[The Provoked Wife]]'': "These are good times. A woman may have a gallant and a separate maintenance too."]]
''The Provoked Wife'' is something of a Restoration [[problem play]] in its attention to the subordinate legal position of married women and the complexities of "divorce" and separation, issues that had been highlighted in the mid-1690s by some notorious cases before the [[House of Lords]] (see Stone).

Sir John Brute in ''The Provoked Wife'' is tired of matrimony. He comes home drunk every night and is continually rude and insulting to his wife. She is meanwhile tempted to embark on an affair with the witty and faithful Constant. Divorce is no option for either of the Brutes at this time, but forms of legal separation have recently arisen and would entail separate maintenance for the wife. Such an arrangement would prevent remarriage. Still, muses Lady Brute, in one of many discussions with her niece Bellinda, "These are good times. A woman may have a gallant and a separate maintenance too."

Bellinda is meanwhile grumpily courted by Constant's friend Heartfree, who is surprised and dismayed to find himself in love with her. The bad example of the Brutes is a constant warning to Heartfree not to marry.

''The Provoked Wife'' is a talk play, with the focus less on love scenes and more on discussions between friends, female (Lady Brute and Bellinda) and male (Constant and Heartfree). These are full of jokes, but are also thoughtful, with a dimension of melancholy and frustration.

After a forged-letter complication, the play ends with marriage between Heartfree and Bellinda and stalemate between the Brutes. Constant continues to pay court to Lady Brute, and she continues to shilly-shally.

===End of comedy===
The tolerance for Restoration comedy even in its modified form was running out by the end of the 17th century, as public opinion turned to respectability and seriousness faster than playwrights did. Interconnected causes for this shift in taste were [[demographic]] change, the [[Glorious Revolution]] of 1688, [[William III of England|William]]'s and [[Mary II of England|Mary]]'s dislike of the theatre, and the lawsuits brought against playwrights by the [[Society for the Reformation of Manners]] (founded in 1692). When [[Jeremy Collier]] attacked Congreve and Vanbrugh in his ''[[Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage]]'' in 1698, he was confirming a shift in audience taste that had taken place. At the much-anticipated all-star première in 1700 of ''The Way of the World'', Congreve's first comedy for five years, the audience showed only moderate enthusiasm for that subtle and almost melancholy work. The comedy of sex and wit was about to be replaced by the drama of obvious sentiment and exemplary morality.