Restoration comedy

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.

Further reading

This section lists a selection of seminal critical studies.

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• Canfield, Douglas (1997). Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky.
• Fujimura, Thomas H. (1952). The Restoration Comedy of Wit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Holland, Norman N. (1959). The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Markley, Robert (1988). Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Oxford : Clarendon Press.
• Weber, Harold (1986). The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Zimbardo, Rose A. (1965). Wycherley's Drama: A Link in the Development of English Satire. New Haven: Yale University Press.