RESTORATION COMEDY

Restoration theatre & comedy of manners virtually synonymous

COMEDY OF MANNERS
Witty, cynical, epigrammatic, cerebral form of drama which satirizes the manners/ fashions
of a particular social class -- ability / inability of certain characters to meet social standards
(morally trivial but exacting)
plot
illicit love affair / scandalous matter (main theme = sexual relations, sexantagonism, a struggle of wit rather than of emotion)
subordinate to the play's witty dialogue and biting commentary on human
foibles/eccentricities
ingrained character == way people behave in society == characteristics they adopt in
social interactions -- often absurd and distorted, "acquired follies" hypocrisy of social manners
ancient Greece - Menander - imitated by Plautus and Terence - comedies widely
known and copied during the Renaissance.
Molire, satirized the hypocrisy and pretension of 17th-century French society
(1663; The School for Wives) and (1667; The Misanthrope).
England - comedy of manners - great day during the Restoration period -affected wit & acquired follies = qualities satirized in caricature characters (Sir
Fopling Flutte in Etherege's The Man of Mode)
late 18th century Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer, 1773)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Rivals, 1775; The School for Scandal, 1777)
Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's Fan (1893) and The Importance of Being
Earnest (1899).
20th century - witty, sophisticated drawing-room plays of Nol Coward

Frenchified fop
True wit/ would-be wit/fool (pretender to knowledge and verbal
ability, eternal attempts to produce a witty retort)
conceited gallant (thought himself irresistible to the ladies)
pompous man-of-affairs (affectation)
prude/ false prude
cuckolds
rustic ingnues sophisticated Cits (citizens)
libertine Restoration rake (of either sex) avoids traps of
matrimony through promiscuity and adultery hedonistic appetites
dissonance at once admiring and disapproving of the rake
rewarded (money, power, beautiful heiress) + socially realigned
through marriage moral propriety
ending = centripetal: promiscuous rakes and rebellious women
resisting (enforced) marriage insistence of freedom to change
and choose normally centripetalised in marriage restoration
social comedy ends in the right couple inheriting estate -- cultural

work social comedy performs is fundamentally conservative,

socializing rakes into marriages that are linked with estates -Restoration comedy exalts marriages based on free consent -negotiations for these marriages proviso scenes social contract
between marriage partners