Restoration comedy is the name given to English comedies written and performed in the Restoration period from 1660 to 1700. After public stage performances had been banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, the re-opening of the theatres in 1660 signalled a rebirth of English drama. Restoration comedy is famous or notorious for its sexual explicitness, a quality encouraged by Charles II (1660-1685) personally and by the rakish aristocratic ethos of his court. Socially diverse audiences 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 woman playwright, Aphra Behn.

Centered on tensions between the accepted social codes of behavior toward sex and marriage, and the rather more direct behavioral prerogatives of human lust and social ambition

“war between the sexes” is a common theme

THESE PLAYS ARE NOT WRITTEN IN VERSE.

By William Congreve, The play is based around the two lovers Mirabell and Millamant. In order for the two to get married and receive Millamant's full dowry, Mirabell must receive Millamant's aunt, Lady Wishfort's blessing. Unfortunately, she is a bitter lady who hates Mirabell and wants her own nephew, Sir Witwoud to marry Millamant.

Other characters include Fainall who is having a secret affair with Mrs. Marwood, a friend of Mrs. Fainall's, who in turn once had an affair with Mirabell.

Waitwell is Mrs. Fainall's servant and is married to Foible, Mrs. Wishfort's servant. Waitwell pretends to be Sir Rowland and on Mirabell's command, tries to trick Lady Wishfort into a false engagement.

By William Wycherley. A product of the tolerant early Restoration period, the play reflects an aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, and was controversial for its sexual explicitness even in its own time. Even its title contains a lewd pun. It is based on several plays by Molière, with added features that 1670s London audiences demanded: colloquial prose dialogue in place of Molière's verse, a complicated, fast-paced plot tangle, and many sex jokes. It turns on two indelicate plot devices: a rake's trick of pretending impotence in order to safely have clandestine affairs with married women, and the arrival in London of an inexperienced young "country wife", with her discovery of the joys of town life, especially the fascinating London men.

The Country Wife is more neatly constructed than most Restoration comedies, but is typical of its time and place in having three sources and three plots. The separate plots are interlinked but distinct, each projecting a sharply different mood. They are:

Horner's impotence trick

the married life of Pinchwife and Margery

the courtship of Harcourt and Alithea

(1775) By Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 

The play is set in Bath in the 18th century, a town legendary for conspicuous consumption and fashion at the time. People would travel there to take the waters which were believed to have healing properties. The town was much less exclusive than London, and provides an ideal setting for the characters.

The plot centres around two characters: Lydia Languish and Captain Jack Absolute. Lydia is obsessed with the romantic ideals of love she reads in popular novels of the time, and is drawn into a relationship with Captain Absolute, who pretends to be a poor soldier called Ensign Beverly. Lydia finds the idea of eloping with a poor soldier romantic. In reality, Captain Absolute is a rich gentleman, the son of Sir Anthony Absolute. Both Sir Anthony and Mrs Malaprop, Lydia's aunt, want to prevent their secret romance. Mrs Malaprop wants Lydia to marry for financial reasons.

The marriage arranged by Sir Anthony is, in fact, with Lydia, but when Lydia finds out who Ensign Beverly really is, she refuses to marry him, clinging to her romantic notions of eloping with a poor soldier.

Faulkland, who is a close friend of Jack, falls in love with Julia, Sir Anthony's ward. However, he has irrational doubts about Julia's love for him and eventually decides to test her love. Julia rejects him. 

Bob Acres decides to fight a duel against the fictional Ensign Beverly, and Sir Lucius O'Trigger wants to duel against Jack Absolute. Lydia stops the fight at the prospect of Jack's death and admits that she loves him and Julia forgives Faulkland.

(1775), By Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 

Brothers Joseph and Charles Surface, and their cousin Maria, are orphans in the care of their uncle, Sir Peter Teazle. Both brothers wish to marry Maria. Lady Sneerwell, a malicious gossip and founder of The School for Scandal, wants to marry Charles and spreads false rumours about an affair between Charles and Lady Teazle in an attempt to make Maria reject Charles. Meanwhile, Joseph is attempting to seduce Lady Teazle. The brothers have a rich uncle, Sir Oliver, whom they have never met, and who visits them both incognito to test their characters before deciding which of them shall inherit his fortune. He finds that Joseph is a sanctimonious hypocrite, and that Charles is a generous libertine, and prefers Charles.

In a farcical scene involving characters hiding behind furniture, Sir Peter learns of the plotting between Joseph and Lady Sneerwell, that the rumours about Charles and Lady Teazle are false, and that his wife is merely a victim of Joseph's flattery. He is therefore reconciled with his wife, and decides that Charles deserves to marry Maria. Lady Teazle, who has had a narrow escape from ruin, delivers an epilogue warning of the dangers of scandal-making.

She Stoops to Conquer

(1773) by Oliver Goldsmith. 

In essence, the play is a farce, full of misunderstandings.

The hero is Charles Marlow, a wealthy young man who is being forced by his family to consider a potential bride whom he has never met. He is anxious about meeting her, because he suffers from shyness and can only behave naturally with women of a lower class. He sets out with a friend to travel to the home of his prospective in-laws, the Hardcastles, but they become lost on the road.

While the bride-to-be is awaiting his arrival, her half-brother, Tony Lumpkin (one of literature's great comic characters), while out riding, comes across the two strangers, and, realising their identity, plays a practical joke by telling them that they are a long way from their destination and will have to stay overnight at an inn. The "inn" he directs them to is in fact the home of his parents. When they arrive, their hosts, who have been expecting them, go out of their way to make them welcome. However, the two men, believing themselves in a hostelry, behave rudely.

Meanwhile, Tony's sister, Kate, learning of the error and also acquainted with her suitor's shyness, masquerades as a serving-maid in order to get to know him. He falls in love with her and plans to elope with her. Needless to say, all misunderstandings are sorted out in the end, and Charles and Kate live happily ever after.

Love's Last Shift, or, Virtue Rewarded 

(1696), by Colley Cibber. 

It is regarded as an early herald of a massive shift in audience taste, away from the intellectualism and sexual frankness of Restoration comedy and towards the conservative certainties and gender role backlash of exemplary or sentimental comedy. It is often described as opportunistic (Hume), containing as it does something for everybody: daring Restoration comedy sex scenes, sentimental reconciliations, and broad farce.

Love's Last Shift is the story of a last "shift" or trick that a virtuous wife, Amanda, is driven to in order to reform and retain her out-of-control rakish husband Loveless. Loveless has been away for ten years, dividing his time between the brothel and the bottle, and no longer recognizes his wife when he returns to London. Acting the part of a high-class prostitute, Amanda inveigles Loveless into her luxurious house and treats him to the night of his dreams, confessing her true identity in the morning. Loveless is so impressed by her faithfulness that he immediately becomes a reformed character.

A minor part which was a great success with the première audience is the fop Sir Novelty Fashion, written by Cibber for himself to play. Sir Novelty flirts with all the women, but is more interested in his own exquisite appearance and witticisms.

"The Rape of the Lock" by Alexander Pope is a mock-heroic poem, first published in 1712 in two cantos, and then reissued in 1714 in a much-expanded 5-canto version.

The poem is based on an incident involving friends of Pope. Arabella Fermor and her suitor, Lord Petre were both from aristocratic Catholic families at a time, in England, when Catholicism was legally proscribed. Petre, wooing Arabella, had cut off a lock of her hair without permission, and the resulting argument had created a breach between the two families. Pope wrote the poem at the request of a friend in order to "laugh the two together". Pope refigures Arabella as Belinda and introduces an entire system of "sylphs", or guardian spirits of virgins, a parodic version of the gods and goddess of conventional epic. Pope satirizes a petty squabble by comparing it to the epic world of the gods. Pope is criticizing the over-reaction of contemporary society to trivial things.

By Alexander Pope, The poem is the nearest thing in eighteenth-century, English writing to what might be called a neo-classical manifesto, although it is never as categorically expounded as the term implies. It comes closer, perhaps, to being a handbook, or guide, to the critic's and poet's art, very much in the style of Horace's Ars Poetica, or, to take the English models with which the young Pope was especially familiar, the Earl of Roscommon's translation of Horace, The Art Of Poetry, (1680), and John Sheffield's (the Duke of Buckingham's) Essay On Poetry, (1682). It is accordingly of great value to us today in understanding what Pope and many of his contemporaries saw as the main functions and justifications of criticism in early, eighteenth-century England.

The poem is articulated through a more consciously epigrammatic style than anything found elsewhere in Pope's poetry. It is built upon a series of maxims, or pithy apothegms, such as “To Err is Humane; to forgive, Divine,” (525), or “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” (625). Pope's ability to sum up an idea tersely and memorably in a phrase, line, or couplet, of packed, imaginative clarity is a hallmark of An Essay on Criticism. Few other poems in the language contain so many formulations that have gone on to achieve an independent, proverbial existence in our culture. The polished couplets encapsulate points that reverberate in the manner of conversational repartee.

By Alexander Pope, "The Essay on Man" is a philosophical poem, written, characteristically, in heroic couplets, and published between 1732 and 1734. Pope intended it as the centerpiece of a proposed system of ethics to be put forth in poetic form: it is in fact a fragment of a larger work which Pope planned but did not live to complete. It is an attempt to justify, as Milton had attempted to vindicate, the ways of God to Man, and a warning that man himself is not, as, in his pride, he seems to believe, the center of all things. Though not explicitly Christian, the Essay makes the implicit assumption that man is fallen and unregenerate, and that he must seek his own salvation.

The "Essay" consists of four epistles, addressed to Lord Bolingbroke, and derived, to some extent, from some of Bolingbroke's own fragmentary philosophical writings, as well as from ideas expressed by the deistic third Earl of Shaftsbury. Pope sets out to demonstrate that no matter how imperfect, complex, inscrutable, and disturbingly full of evil the Universe may appear to be, it does function in a rational fashion, according to natural laws; and is, in fact, considered as a whole, a perfect work of God. It appears imperfect to us only because our perceptions are limited by our feeble moral and intellectual capacity. His conclusion is that we must learn to accept our position in the Great Chain of Being--a "middle state," below that of the angels but above that of the beasts--in which we can, at least potentially, lead happy and virtuous lives.

(1640 - 1689)

Aphra Behn stars in the canon of English literature as the first known English woman to earn her living by the pen. She is famous for her prose work Oroonoko (1688) and for her comic Restoration dramas such as The Rover (1681) and The Lucky Chance (1686). As well as plays and prose she wrote poetry and translated works from French and Latin.

From what we know of her life she had a colourful childhood and adolescence, some of which was spent in Dutch Guiana in the West Indies (providing material for Oroonoko).

The Forc'd Marriage, her first play, was produced in 1671, and its witty and vivacious style was typical of her work. The Rover, produced in two parts, was a highly successful depiction of the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers in Madrid and Naples during the exile of Charles II. Oroonoko is the story of an enslaved African prince and is now considered a foundation stone in the development of the English novel. Among her sources was the Italian commedia dell' arte (improvised comedy).

In her time she was a popular celebrity who caused something of a stir due to her independence as a professional writer and her concern for equality between the sexes.

She often published under her spy code-name, Astrea.