Restoration Comedy

The term "Restoration comedy" refers to English comedies written and performed in the Restoration period from 1660 to 1710. Comedy of manner is used as a synonym of Restoration comedy. After public stage performances had been banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, the re-opening of the theatres in 1660 signaled a renaissance of English drama. The sexually explicit language was encouraged by King Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish style of his court.

King Charles II

The socially diverse audiences included both aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on, and a substantial middle-class segment. 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.

Aphra Behn-spy, writer and female libertine – a one-woman show.

Theater company

Original patent companies (1660-1682)

Charles II was an active and interested patron of the drama. Soon after his restoration, in 1660, he granted exclusive play-staging rights, so-called Royal patents, to the King’s company and the Duke’s company, led by two middle-aged Caroline playwrights, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant. The patentees scrambled for performance rights to the previous generation's Jacobean and Caroline plays, which were the first necessity for economic survival before any new plays existed. Their next priority was to build new, splendid patent theater in Drury Lane and Dorset Gardens respectively. Striving to outdo each other in magnificence, Killigrew and Davenant ended up with quite similar theatres, both designed by Christopher Wren, both optimally provided for music and dancing, and both fitted with moveable scenery and elaborate machines for thunder, lightning, and waves.

United Company, (1682–1695)

Both the quantity and quality of the drama suffered when in 1682 the more successful Duke's Company absorbed the struggling King's Company, and the amalgamated United Company was formed. The production of new plays dropped off sharply in the 1680s, affected by both the monopoly and the political situation. The influence and the incomes of the actors dropped, too. In the late 80s, predatory investors ("Adventurers") converged on the United Company, while management was taken over by the lawyer Christopher Rich. Rich attempted to finance a tangle of "farmed" shares and sleeping partners by slashing salaries and, dangerously, by abolishing the traditional perks of senior performers, who were stars with the clout to fight back.

War of the theatres, (1695–1700)

The company owners, wrote the young United Company employee Colley Cibber "who had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presumed they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people, did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public was inclined to support.” Performers like the legendary Thomas Betterton the tragedienne Elizabeth Berry and the rising young comedian Anne Bracegirdle had the audience on their side and, in the confidence of this, they walked out.

The actors gained a Royal "license to perform", thus bypassing Rich's ownership of both the original Duke's and King's Company patents from 1660, and formed their own cooperative company. This unique venture was set up with detailed rules for avoiding arbitrary managerial authority, regulating the ten actors' shares, the conditions of salaried employees, and the sickness and retirement benefits of both categories. The cooperative had the good luck to open in 1695 with the première of William Congreve’s famous Love For Love and the skill to make it a huge box-office success.

Nell Gwynn was one of the first actresses and the mistress of Charles II

Thomas Betterton played the irresistible Dorimant in George Etherege's Man of Mode. Betterton's acting ability was praised by Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pope, and Colley Cibber.

Comedies

Aristocratic comedy, (1660–1680)

The drama of the 1660s and 1670s was vitalized by the competition between the two patent companies created at the Restoration, as well as by the personal interest of Charles II, and the comic playwrights rose to the demand for new plays. They stole freely from the contemporary French and Spanish stage, from English Jacobean and Caroline plays, and even from Greek and Roman classical comedies, and combined the looted plotlines in adventurous ways.

Example. William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675)

The decline of comedy, (1678–1690)

When the two companies were amalgamated in 1682 and the London stage became a monopoly, both the number and the variety of new plays being written dropped sharply. There was a swing away from comedy to serious political drama, reflecting preoccupations and divisions following on the Popish plot (1678) and the Exclusion crisis (1682). The few comedies produced also tended to be political in focus, the Whig dramatist Thomas Shadwell sparring with the Tories Jhon Dryden and Aphra Behn. Behn's unique achievement as an early professional woman writer has been the subject of much recent study.

Comedy renaissance, (1690–1700)

During the second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer" comedies of William Congreve and Jhon 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

Example. John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife (1697)

Everything that is being discovered, either it is good or bad, it is always criticized by some people...

"Critics remain astonishingly defensive about the masterpieces of this period", wrote Robert D. Hume as late as 1976. It is only over the last few decades that that statement has become untrue, as Restoration comedy has been acknowledged a rewarding subject for high theory analysis and Wycherley's The Country Wife, long branded the most obscene play in the English language, has become something of an academic favorite. "Minor" comic writers are getting a fair share of attention, especially the post-Aphra Behn generation of women playwrights which appeared just around the turn of the 18th century: Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Susannah Centlivre. A broad study of the majority of never-reprinted Restoration comedies has been made possible by Internet access (by subscription only) to the first editions at the British Library.