Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy [antikvár]

Preface to tke First Edition The plays in this volume are comedies about men and women who live in London, care for sex and money, and make fools of one another if not of themselves. There is nothing strange about that combination of activities, as anyone who has lived in London or cared for sex and money will know; and since more than a thousand comedies in English concern the same matters, the reader may wonder why these few should be drawn together for special attention. The answer is not that these few are classics which anyone interested in drama should read; and the obvious point that they belong, more or less, to one period in the chronology of English literature, while a better answer, is only a beginning. The reason for drawing together plays from one period is that in reading them, in attending to their relationships to one another and to the age from which they come, we can learn to imagine the theater at the same time as we learn to imagine history. Take the theater first. Readers of a play are in a difficult position, because they are reading something that was not primarily meant to be read. Plays are performances, and they need actors, a stage, an audience before they fully exist. Hence, reading plays ought to make one feel a bit silly—like wearing sunglasses to see how the flower grows—until one develops an imagination to witness a printed drama as a performed event, an enactment occurring within a particular set of theatrical circumstances. The London theater from 1660 through most of the eighteenth century was a place of unusual excitement and innovation, and it deserves to be imagined. It was not a "transitional" stage, standing a bit uncertainly (as some have thought) between the Shakespearean playhouse and the theater of realism, but a coherent stage where established traditions were enlivened with new intentions, and where a sense of risk and venture could be based upon trusted conventions. Modern scholarship, particularly in the magnificent eleven-volume The London Stage, has finally brought this theater into focus, an achievement I have tried to represent under the heading "Stages, Actors, and Audiences." The reader will find the basic theatrical information there. The historical imagination reaches beyond the playhouse to the cit>', and to the range of social and intellectual attitudes from which comedy was observed in London between 1660 and 1800. This period presents the first example in England of a transaction between the theater and