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This rich and varied portrait of the drama from 1660 to 1714 provides students with essential information about playwrights, staging and genres, situating them in the social and political culture of the time. No longer seen as a privileged arena for select dramatists and elite courtiers, the Restoration theatre is revealed in all of its tumult, energy and conflict. The fourteen newly-commissioned essays examine the theatre, paying attention to major playwrights such as Dryden, Wycherly and Congreve and also to more minor works and to plays by the first professional female dramatists. The book begins with chapters on the performance of the drama in its own time, on theatres, acting and staging, and continues with the main dramatic genres and themes, with a final chapter on the critical history of the drama. The volume also includes a thorough chronology and biographies and bibliographies of dramatists.

Often perceived as merely formulaic or historical documents, dramatic prologues and epilogues - players' comic, poetic bids for the audience's good opinion - became essential parts of Restoration theater, appearing in over 90 percent of performed and printed plays between 1660 and 1714. Their popularity coincided with the rise of the English actress, and Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater unites these elements in the first book-length study on the subject. It finds that these paratexts provided the first sanctioned space for actresses in Britain to voice ideas in public, communicate directly with other women, and perform comedy - arguably the most powerful type of speech, and one that enabled interrogation of misogynist social practices. This book provides a taxonomy of prologues and epilogues with a corresponding appendix, and demonstrates through case studies of Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield how the study of prologues and epilogues enriches Restoration theater scholarship.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

An examination of one of the most remarkable qualities of stage comedy during the late 17th-century - its stability. Corman proposes a new way of looking at genre and generic change and brings a remarkable thoroughness and sensitivity to his study of individual authors and their work.

Framed by the publication of Leviathan and the 1713 Licensing Act, this collection provides analysis of both canonical and non-canonical texts within the scope of an eighty-year period of theatre history, allowing for definition and assessment that uncouples Restoration drama from eighteenth-century drama. Individual essays demonstrate the significant contrasts between the theatre of different decades and the context of performance, paying special attention to the literary innovation and socio-political changes that contributed to the evolution of drama. Exploring the developments in both tragedy and comedy, and in literary production, specific topics include the playwright's relationship to the monarch, women writers' connection to the audience, the changing market for plays, and the rise of the bourgeoisie. This collection also examines aspects of gender and class through the exploration of women's impact on performance and production, masculinity and libertinism, master/servant relationships, and dramatic representations of the coffee house. Accompanied by a list of Spanish-English plays and a chronology of monarch's reigns and significant changes in theatre history, From Leviathan to Licensing Act is a valuable tool for scholars of Restoration and eighteenth-century performance, providing groundwork for future research and investigation. Catie Gill is lecturer in Early Modern Writing at Loughborough University. Contents: Introduction, Catie Gill; What do the servants know?, Paddy Lyons; Flinging the book away: books, reading and gender in the Restoration stage, Jacqueline Pearson; Coffee-houses and Restoration drama, Juan A. Prieto-Pablos; Sex and tyranny revisited: Waller's The Maid's Tragedy and Rochester's Valentinian, Sandra Clark; Sex, tyranny and the problem of allegiance: political drama during the Restoration, Warren Chernaik; The adaptation of 17th-century Spanish drama to the English stage during the Restoration period: the case of Chalderón, Jorge Braga Riera; The female wits: women writers at work, Jane Milling; 'Jilting jades'? Perceptions of female playgoers in the Restoration, 1660-1700, Fiona Ritchie; Revolution and the moral reform of the stage: the case of Durfey's The Marriage-Hater Matched (1692), María José Mora and Manuel J. Gómez-Lara; Works cited; Index.

In this provocative study Rose Zimbardo examines a crucial revolution in aesthetics that took place in the late seventeenth century and that to this day dominates our response to literature. Although artists of that time continued to follow the precept \"imitate nature,\" that nature no longer corresponds to the earlier understanding of the term. What had been in essence an allegorical mode came to be a literal one. Focusing on the drama of the period as an exemplary form, Zimbardo shows how it moved from depicting a metaphysical reality of idea to portraying an inner reality of individual experience. But drama is constrained in expressing the inner experience since its medium is limited to human action. The novel arose to replace drama as the popular literary form, Zimbardo argues, because it could better and more freely convey man's inner world and thereby imitate the \"new\" nature. The study concluded that the changes which took place in drama during this period and which led to the invention of the novel resulted not from any \"change of heart\" or sensibility but from a fundamental change in the understanding of the nature which art was thought to imitate. Neither the drama of the 1690s nor the early novel, Zimbardo finds, was in the least \"sentimental.\" A Mirror to Naturebrings a new critical perspective to bear on literary developments at the end of the seventeenth century -- one that must be considered by critics and historians of the period.

Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism through reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Webster argues that libertines, both real and imagined, performed traditionally secretive acts, including excessive drinking, sex, sedition, and sacrilege, in the public sphere. This eruption of the private into the public challenged a Stuart ideology that distinguished between the nation's public life and the king's and his subjects' private consciences.

Drawing on feminist cultural materialist theories and historiographies, ‘Treading the bawds’ analyses the collaboration between actresses Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle and women playwrights such as Aphra Behn and Mary Pix, and traces a line of influence from the time of the first theatres royal to the rebellion that resulted in the creation of a player’s co-operative. Bush-Bailey offers a fresh approach to the history of women, seeing their neglected plays in the context of performance. By combining detailed analysis of selected plays within the broader context of a playhouse managed by its leading actresses, Bush-Bailey challenges the received historical and literary canons, including a radical solution to the mysterious identity of the anonymous playwright ‘Ariadne’. It is a story of female collaboration and influence with the spotlight focused on the very public world of women in the commercial business of theatre.

Colonial Women is the first comprehensive study to explore the interpenetrating discourses of gender and race in Stuart drama. Analyzing the plays of Shakespeare, Fletcher, Davenant, Dryden, Behn and other playwrights, Heidi Hutner argues that in drama, as in historical accounts, the symbol of the native woman is used to justify and promote the success of the English appropriation, commodification, and exploitation of the New World and its native inhabitants.

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas written for the restored English theatres in the later seventeenth century, reading them as complex and sophisticated responses to a crisis of public life in the wake of the mid-century regicide and revolution. The unique form of the Restoration heroic play, with its scenes of imperial conquest peopled by hesitating and indecisive heroes, interrogates traditional oppositions of agency and passivity, autonomy and servility, that structure conventional narratives of political service and public virtue, exploring, in the process, new and often unsettling models of order and governance. Situating the dramas of Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in their historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, Brandon Chua offers an account of a culture's attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.