This Companion illustrates the vitality and diversity of dramatic work 1660 to 1710. Twenty-five essays by leading scholars in the field bring together the best recent insights into the full range of dramatic practice and innovation at the time. Introduces readers to the recent boom in scholarship that has revitalised Restoration drama Explores historical and cultural contexts, genres of Restoration drama, and key dramatists, among them Dryden and Behn

Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.

Aphra Behn was the first woman to earn her living by writing for the theater, and was ranked by Defoe alongside Rochester and Milton as one of the 'great wits' of her century.

Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth. By reading well-known works in unexpected ways and focusing on less frequently studied dramatists, from Sedley, Motteux, Pix, and Behn to Manley, Trotter, and Shadwell, the contributors also test the limits of the canon. In addition, they suggest that earlier critical perceptions, perhaps even more than the “innate worth” of the plays, determined the shape of the canon. These essays present a different image of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, one that reveals how the drama was a site as important for the negotiation of cultural meaning as were novels and verse satires.

What is Restoration comedy? What pleasure does it offer its audience, and what significance does it find in exploring that pleasure? Edward Burns here provides a new account of the origins and nature of Restoration comedy as a distinct genre. The book enlarges the usual focus with a wider range of writers than the conventional ossified canon taking in a revaluation of many rarely studied dramatists, a reconsideration of pastoral, and the instatement of women writers as major contributors to the culture of the age. It offers a substantial and original interpretation of one of the most intriguing of seventeenth-century literature forms.

The magic of Naples during Carnival inspires love between a disparate group of local citizens and visiting Englishmen.

This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to please diverse audiences, who were notoriously fickle as well as predisposed to oppose them. Accessible to both graduates and undergraduates, Popular Plays by Women shows how these playwrights captured audiences through wit, social awareness, and dramatic dexterity. As well as including the prologues and epilogues of the four plays presented, this anthology provides additional materials in which female playwrights discuss the prejudices and special difficulties they face.

Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency; this is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.

[TRAIN OF THOUGHT is a] clever, contemporary urban comedy [that] takes us inside the heads of four late-night travelers headed downtown...Pospisil draws out neat surprises from his characters as they move toward their destinations (metaphorical as well as Recreating the pleasures of nineteenth-century platform entertainment with a tart contemporary twist, Donald Margulies' SHIPWRECKED offers a self-promoting fabulist a forum to inform and persuade, and it delights in both respects. --Variety. The Pulitze