Restoration Theatre:
Wycherley (1641-1716) and
Behn (1640?-1689)
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Restoration Period
• Looser morals
• Puritans banned theatre in 1642, and also
many folk rituals like Maypole dancing
• Restoration is 1660, when Charles regained
the throne after the Commonwealth and
Protectorate, but Restoration drama
generally refers to drama written between
then and about 1700.
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Restoration Literature
• Deals with sexual matters
• John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
• Frank and free exploration of sexual mores and
behaviour
• Comedy prevails in period between Charles’s
Restoration and the advent of sentimental comedy
at the beginning of the 18th Century
• But also plenty of heroic tragedy
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Restoration Comedy
• Also known as artificial comedy or comedy
of manners
• Presents a society of elegance and
stylishness
• Social codes of middle and upper classes
• Witty, urbane and sometimes licentious
• Intricacies of sexual and marital intrigue –
therefore also with adultery and cuckoldry
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Conditions of Restoration
Theatre
• New Restoration companies issued with patents
and patronage by Royal personages (1660)
• King’s Men: granted playing rights under
Charles’s own patronage, under the control of
Thomas Killigrew
• Duke’s Men: patronage of the Duke of York,
under the control of William Davenant
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Restoration Theatres
• Tennis courts to start with – net line divided the
audience (c. 400) from the players
• 1663: Killigrew moved King’s Men to a disused
riding school in Drury Lane
1674: purpose-built Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
• 1671: Davenant moved the Duke’s Men to
purpose-built Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Garden,
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Killigrew/King’s Company
1660: Gibbons’s Tennis Court in Vere Street
1663: Killigrew moved King’s Men to a disused
riding school in Drury Lane
1672: It burnt down.
1674: purpose-built Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
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Davenant/Duke’s Company
1661: Lisle’s Tennis Court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields
(Betterton and Co. acting in Cockpit until Davenant
moved them here)
1671: Davenant moved Duke’s Men to purpose-built
theatre in Dorset Garden.
1682: Companies were united, under actor/manager
Betterton.
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Purpose Built Theatres
• Staging scenery – perspectival views
• Davenant and John Webb (set designer) first
employed this in The Siege of Rhodes (1656)
• Painted backgrounds on back wall of stage and
moveable flat shutters which fitted into grooves
which could be drawn across the stage
• Covered stage and auditorium lit by windows
above the stage, the light supplemented by candles
• Apron stage – actor in close proximity to audience
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The de Witt sketch of the Swan Theatre (c. 1596),
which is the only contemporary drawing of the inside
of an Elizabethan playhouse
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Dramaturgical Points
• Actors and actresses typecast
• Married couples often played in the same play
• Characters moved from play to sequel played by
same actors, even when sequel by different
playwright
• Interplay between stage and audience not confined
to asides – caricaturing of well-known real people
does occur.
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Actresses!
• In France actresses already played female parts
• Better to have women playing women rather than
men dressing up as women
• Actresses also high-class prostitutes to supplement
their income
• ‘Restoration actresses brought sexuality to the
stage in a palpable, though hardly in a more
realistic, way’ J. L. Styan
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Sex Scenes
• Rare in early modern drama – City comedy and
Romeo and Juliet don’t play for the sex
• The Relapse: Loveless unceremoniously bundles
Berinthia into a cupboard
• The Man of Mode: Bellinda and Dorimant explicit
scene
• Angellica and Willmore in The Rover. Also what
happens to Blunt.
• Opportunities for female nudity these scenes
offered
• The Country Wife: ‘China’ scene.
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Night-gowns and breeches
• Women in state of undress for bed –
Florinda in The Rover
• Women dressed as boys (so you can see
their legs)
• Devices to show the actresses’ bodies off
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Restoration Theories of Comedy
• ‘For, as Aristotle saies rightly, the moving of
laughter is a fault in Comedie, a kind of turpitude,
that depraves some part of a mans nature without a
disease’ Ben Jonson
• Classical theories very important to writers of
Restoration drama; also what Jonson and
Shakespeare (might have) thought was discussed
and reused.
• Satire (moving forward to Swift) – Fletcherian
Romantic Comedy – comedy of humours
(Shadwell)
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Crucial Questions
• What did Restoration playwrights think
comedy should be?
• How did they relate their efforts to the
dramas of the ‘last age’?
• What were their purposes in writing
comedies the way they did?
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Problems
• Almost impossible to construct a coherent
theory of comedy from Restoration practice,
even when combined with theories
• Critics have very different ideas about what
each play shows
• Playwrights keep changing their minds
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Aphra Behn (Preface to The
Dutch Lover (1673))
• ‘Recent plays have been as effective as recent
sermons have been in improving the morals and
the wit of their respective audiences’
• She claims no playwright ever wrote with the aim
of improving the morals of the audience
• Comedy was never meant ‘either for a converting
or a conforming ordinance’
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Aphra Behn (Dedication to The
Lucky Chance (1687))
• Plays are ‘secret instructions to the People,
in things tis impossible to insinuate to them
any other way…Tis example alone that
inspires Morality, and best establishes
Vertue.’
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William Congreve, Amendments to Mr
Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations
(1698)
• ‘Comedy (says Aristotle) is an Imitation of the
worst sort of people…in respect to their
Manners…They must be exposed after a
ridiculous manner: For Men are to be laugh’d out
of their Vices in Comedy’
• Sir Richard Blackmore (1695) ‘The business of
comedy is to render Vice ridiculous, to expose it
to publick Derision and contempt, and to make
Men ashamed of Vile and Sordid actions’
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Types of Restoration Comedy
• Low, crudely instructive ‘comedy of
humours’
• Gay, witty, refined ‘comedy of manners’
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Quintilian
• Urbanitas: the language of the cities and of
learning
• Venustus: graceful, charming
• Salsus: salty, piquant
• Facetus: polished, elegant
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Mixed Comedy
• ‘These are those which are neither all wit,
nor all humour, but the result of both.
Neither so little of humour as Fletcher
shows, nor so little of love or wit as Jonson;
neither all cheat, with which the best plays
of the one are filled, nor all adventure,
which is the common practice of the other.’
Dryden
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Repartee
• The verbal equivalent of the struggle for sexual
and mental superiority between these two
characters in any of the comedies – it figures in
words what they experience in fact
• Dryden: ‘as it is the very soul of conversation, so
it is the greatest grace of comedy, where it is
proper to the characters. There may be much of
acuteness in a thing well said; but there is more in
a quick reply “for wit always looks more graceful
in reply than in attack.”’
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Theorising Comedy
Aphra Behn:
‘I think a play the best divertissement that
wise men have: but I do also think them
nothing so important as those who do
discourse as formally about the rules of it,
as if twere the grand affair of human life.’
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Nostalgia
• Looking back to the ‘good old days’? Historical
nostalgia a feature of the period.
• Tracing your literary ancestors is an important
political act.
• Dryden’s Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), long essay
on what kind of drama the English stage should
have.
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Real-life inspiration?
The Country Wife III.ii:
Spa. ‘They’ll put a man into a Play for looking a
squint: Their predecessors were contented to make
servingmen only their Stage-Fools, but these
rogues must have Gentlemen…nay, Knights.’
Dor. ‘Blame’em not, they must follow their Copy,
the Age’.
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