RESTORATION COMEDYRestoration 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, sex-antagonism, 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. Molière, 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 Noël 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 ingénues – 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