 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
Table of Contents By the time the theaters re-opened in 1660, comedy had broken with the romanticism in which it was steeped in Shakespeare. It had also broken with the verse tradition and showed its realistic tendency by the constant use of prose. Restoration comedy found its models in the native tradition of the satirical plays of Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson’s ‘comedy of humors’. There was also the French influence of Molière, who taught the Restoration dramatists the art of throwing individual characters into relief through dialogue and also supplied them with numerous Themes and plots. The Restoration comedy acquired a liveliness and zest of its own. It rejected the coarse realism and ‘humors’ of Johnson in favor of wit and a representation of the ‘manners’ of men. It was satirical without being didactic because it was rarely inspired by the desire to correct; the aristocratic audience did not wish to be criticized for its follies and vices. Its sole aim, therefore, was to entertain. Dryden, who knew the temper of the age well, aptly commented that the "chief end" of comedy was "divertisement and delight."
The Restoration comedy of manners does not reflect the real life of the fashionable society but the essence of its spirit. The most common Themes concern marriage, sex, cuckoldry, and getting the better of others. Most of the plays represent the attempts of a male character to acquire a wife. As a result, most of these comedies are peopled with fops, fools, gallants, a couple of witty gentlemen and ladies, the antagonistic parent figure, the hypocrite, the cuckolded husband, the forsaken mistress, the romantic older woman, country bumpkins, whores, servants, and scheming maids. While the chief protagonists have true wit, most of the characters have false or pretentious wit, adding to the humor. There has been much critical disagreement over whether this comedy was artificial or realistic. In fact, it was both. It was artificial in the sense that it made great use of traditional theatrical methods, such as caricature and excessive exaggeration, often resulting in farce. It was realistic at the same time because it was filled with lively sketches of certain aspects of contemporary Restoration life. Table of Contents | |
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