5 Renaissance and

Restoration Drama
Renaissance Drama and Christopher Marlowe
• Renaissance drama is a term that embraces Elizabethan drama,
Jacobean drama (works written during the reign of James I),
and the plays written during the reign of Charles
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I, bynames the Virgin Queen
and Good Queen Bess, (born
September 7, 1533, Greenwich, near
London, England—died March 24,
1603, Richmond, Surrey), queen of
England (1558–1603) during a period,
often called the Elizabethan Age, when
England asserted itself vigorously as a
major European power in politics,
commerce, and the arts.
 What is Renaissance?
The revival of art and literature under the influence of classical models in
the 14th–16th centuries.
French word meaning “rebirth”, is applied to the rediscovery and revival of
interest in the art, architecture and literary culture of Antiquity which took
place in Italy from the 14th century onwards, and in Northern Europe a little
later.
 main kinds of theatre: public, private and
court.
Red Lion
- first public playhouse
- built at Whitechapel in 1567, in the courtyard of a farmhouse.
Regular play going: London
Began in 1970s. It had a raised stage with a trapdoor; above it or near it was
a high turret, while around the stage, which thrust into the audience, were
scaffolds or galleries for other playgoers.
• This design was followed for theatres both in Shoreditch, where the
Theatre, which replaced the Red Lion, opened in 1576, and in Southwark,
where the Globe, built out of the timbers from the Theatre, opened in
1599.
 Globe theatre

• holds up to 3,000 spectators

• the theatre most commonly associated with Shakespeare.
• Like the Red Lion, it was essentially an amphithe- atre, with tiered
galleries: those who paid a penny stood before the stage (the groundlings),
while the seats higher up cost more, the audience, as such, being separated
by wealth rather than by social sta- tus.
.
• Although commercial drama was essentially London-based, the the- atres
were closed by the authorities during times of plague, leaving the actors
without income; as a response, smaller touring companies formed out of
the main companies played in the provinces.
• Plays were put on at court for the reigning monarch (the court also
produced its own specific kind of drama, the masque).
Blackfriars (originally a Dominican convent).
another development: in 1596
With benches for spectators and candles for lighting
residents of the Blackfriars precinct strongly objected to a new adult
playhouse in their midst and successfully petitioned the Privy Council to
cancel the arrangement
• In 1600 an acting company consisting of boys (Chamberlain’s Men) began
using it, but in 1609 Shakespeare’s company started playing there on a
regular basis. By this time Elizabeth I had died, James I was on the throne,
and there was a move towards hall-type playhouses which provided an
opportunity for new kinds of stage spectacle, including effects made
possible by candle lighting.
1642, the start of the English Civil War, drama was in decline. The theatres
at that point were closed by the authorities until 1660, when, with the
restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, they opened in very different
circumstances.
• Most Elizabethan plays were performed in the afternoon, in daylight;
scenery was minimal, though the costumes may have been splendid.
Realism was not something aimed for; instead, the emphasis was on ideas,
on debate, on problems. But other conditions, too, influenced the drama.
Plays were subject to licensing. And the authorities were quick to close
the theatres not only in times of plague but also following riots or other
disorder.
• During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, theater was not officially sanctioned
by the government and was, in fact, considered a criminal activity. This was
due to the fact that the Church of England had declared all forms of theater
to be immoral and a threat to public order.
• The situation changed during the reign of King James I, who was a great
supporter of theater. He granted a royal patent to the Lord Chamberlain’s
Men, which allowed them to perform in the newly-built Globe Theatre.
However, all plays had to be run past government censors, meaning that
many plays had Royalist messages.
It was also the case that Puritan opposition to the theatre meant that the
companies had to shelter more and more behind the protection of the court.
• Drama • Poetry

• Drama stages an action in which • Invisible and unheard voice that speaks
a number of people voice the text is single, in drama the voices
different views about the events that we hear are always plural and in
taking place. It represents the dispute. In this way drama comes to
imitation of an action but also reflect ten-sions and problems in the
disturbingly for those in social order, but also intervenes in
positions of authority, offers an them, projecting them into the wider
analysis of that action. world of its audience.
Christopher Marlowe

the first great dramatist of the Renaissance

period.
Born: 1564, the same year as Shakespeare.
The son of a shoemaker,
Education: King’s School in Canterbury and
then Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
gaining his BA degree in 1584, and then his MA
in 1587. This was the traditional route for a
career in teaching, the church or the law, but
Marlowe turned to writing plays.
• He produces no fewer than • Insert pic of the book
seven tragedies, as well as
the nar- rative poem Hero
and Leander (published
1598). He died violently in
1593, in a brawl in a tavern,
receiving a dagger wound
above the eye.
• At the time he had been due to appear before the courts on allegations of atheism and
treason, and after his death he was accused of blasphemy and atheism by another
playwright, Thomas Kyd.

• Marlowe had, a few years earlier, perhaps been involved in espionage on the continent,
and with other criminal activities;

1589 he was in a street fight in which a man was killed, and in 1592 he was deported
from the Netherlands for attempting to pass forged coins.
• Tamburlaine the Great
Marlowe’s first major play
- no date of the first performance

Gorbudoc (1561)
- written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton
- the first blank-verse tragedy, but the speeches in it are stately, heavy and moralistic. It tells the
story of the division of Britain by the king, Gorboduc, between his two sons, an action that leads to
civil war and death.
The play combines sensational events with a serious moral purpose, and has some claim to be
thought of as seminal in the formation of English Renaissance drama, both in its use of blank verse
and in its use of Senecan revenge drama as a model.
It offers some traditional advice about the rule of the kingdom and the dangers of division.
Tamburlaine
- offers something altogether different
It tells the story of a Scythian shepherd chieftain who overthrows the king of the
Persians and then overcomes the Turkish emperor before going on to capture
Damascus from the Sultan of Egypt.
the play consists of a series of conquests of the most powerful armies on earth;
Tamburlaine’s ambition and cruelty carry all before him. The only feeling
Tamburlaine seems to show is for Zenocrate, the captive daughter of the Sultan,
whom he marries.
In Part II – the play is in two parts, the second part written to capitalise on
the suc- cess of the first – Tamburlaine continues his conquests as far as
Babylon and is only finally defeated by death. In terms of plot, the play
offers little more than a sequence of brutal victories by Tamburlaine over
weak rulers who do not deserve to keep power. Where the interest lies, and
why the play made such an impact, is in Marlowe’s mighty blank-verse
lines.
T thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown.
That caus’d the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair,
And place himself in the imperial heaven.

Mov’d me to manage arms against thy state.

What better precedent than mighty Jove?
Nature, that fram’d us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all.
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. (Tamburlaine the Great, [Link].12-29)
• Tamburlaine argues that the attractions of kingship are so powerful that
they caused even Jove, the eldest son of the heavens, to rebel against his
father Saturn, just as Tamburlaine is impelled by his aspir- ing nature.
Two things to take into account to grasp thr
dramatic impact
Marlowe gives this speech, with its The second aspect has to do with
classical references, the key the actu- al language and rhythm of
indicator of civilised values, to a the speech. It is full of large-scale
Scythian shepherd, a figure more images of the heavens and earth, so
commonly associated with that it has a grandeur and
barbarism; it is a deliberate reversal resonance, building to a crescendo
of traditional assumptions, as if in the last two lines. The language
learning itself will inspire men to is on a scale that matches as well as
greatness. expresses Tamburlaine’s heroism.
• Marlowe’s heroes, Tamburlaine can be seen as a figure of Renaissance man
overthrowing the old order of religion and the law in order to achieve his full human
potential. Closely con- nected with this is the idea of the overreacher: Marlowe’s
heroes aspire to a kind of godhead, craving divine power, but overreach themselves
and, like Icarus in classical myth, who drove his father’s chariots too near the sun
and crashed into the sea, fall from the zenith of their achievements. Such a pattern
gives the plays a tragic structure of rise and fall, and also fits in with the epic nature
of Marlowe’s plotting, which adds incident to incident rather than exploring one
situation in detail.
• This, however, is less true of Doctor Faustus (c.1592),
Doctor Faustus (1592)
- Marlowe’s most famous play.
story of a man who sold his soul to the Devil for twenty-four years of
power, knowledge and pleasure.
At the start of the play Faustus, tired of tra- ditional learning and science,
turns to magic, calls up the devil Mephistophilis and makes a compact with
him. In return for his soul, Faustus will be given whatever he desires.
 Central Section of the play
Faustus enjoying his power, but not gaining the kind of knowledge of heaven and
hell that he thirsts for
-as time runs out – the bargain is for no more than twenty-four years – and his
eternal damnation approaches, Faustus hovers between despair and belief. The
play consequently seems to teach a moral lesson in the fashion of the earlier
morality plays, but also questions the limits placed on human knowledge by an
apparently vengeful God. This doubleness of the play is evident both in its form,
which employs Good and Bad Angels to dramatise the divisions in Faustus’s
conscience, and in its language, most famously in Faustus’s final soliloquy.
• Ah, Faustus, And then thou must be damn’d perpetually. Stand still,
you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease and
midnight never come! Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, Fair
nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make Perpetual day. Or let this hour
be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may
repent and save his soul. O lente, lente, currite noctis equi. [O slowly,
slowly, you horses of the night] The stars move still, time runs, the
clock will strike. The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.
O, I’ll leap up to my God; who pulls me down? See, see, where
Christ’s blood streams in the firmament. One drop would save my
soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ! (Doctor Faustus, [Link].143-57)
The language is cosmic, visual and spectacular. Throughout the plays there
is a sense of new worlds being explored,where human knowledge aspires to
new heights, but also a sense of limits and boundaries. In that combination
of elements Marlowe’s plays reflect the changing world of the early modern
period.
• 1543 Copernicus had expounded the belief that the sun, not the earth, was the
centre of the universe, and that the planets moved around it. In 1628 William
Harvey was to announce his discovery of the circulation of the blood. Both the
heavenly and human bodies were no longer what they had once seemed. Marlowe,
writing between these dates, and from a different discourse, articulates a similar
sense of change, of a universe in which knowledge and power are shifting away
from those who had previously possessed them. With that change comes a shift in
how the world is conceived. What Marlowe’s plays particularly illustrate is the
force of language itself in shaping and altering the world, as he questions the fixed
hierarchies of old and opens up new perspectives
At the same time, however, his plays acknowledge the continuing power of
the established regime: Faustus is damned, Tamburlaine dies, and Edward II,
in the play that bears his name, is tortured to death for permitting his
homosexuali- ty to conflict with the role that he is expected to play as king.
In the stress they place on death and violence, Marlowe's plays (the other
significant work we have not mentioned so far is The Jew of Malta, per-
formed about 1592, but not published until 1633) expose the fear that helped
maintain the old order in power despite the subversive voices that were
raised against it.
Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy
• The revenge play proper starts
with Thomas Kyd( author of The
Spanish) Tragedy (c.1587). -A
friend of Marlowe, with whom he
shared lodgings he was arrested
and tortured in 1593, dying the
next year. He may have written a
lost pre-Shakespearean play
about Hamlet, but what is certain
is that The Spanish Tragedy
provided a model of both plotting
and content for later revenge
drama, influencing both
Shakespeare and other
dramatists.
• On stage we see the ghost of Don Andrea who killed in battle. He is with
the spirit of Revenge. They watch as the son of Hieronimo is murdered.
His body is found in his father’s garden. Hieronimo, half mad with grief,
seeks justice from the court after he discovers the identity of the
murderers, but to no avail. Consequently he takes his own revenge by
means of a play in which the murderers, Lorenzo and Balthazar,
participate and die. Hieronimo then bites out his tongue before killing
himself. A central figure in the play is Bel- imperia, Don Andrea’s lover,
who helps Hieronimo with his plot. She is, in fact, indirectly responsible
for his son’s murder by her brother Lorenzo, a M a Machiavellian villain
who delights in intrigue
Formula that other plays followed:
there is a ghost, a play within the play,
a Machiavellian villain, and a grieving,
distracted hero who gives vent to his feelings in agonised soliloquies.
But these are simply matters of form and content. There are other, deeper
reasons for Kyd’s success which have to do with the play’s central theme of
the breakdown of justice.
• Justice is meant to flow from God through the king to his subjects, but in The
Spanish Tragedy this vertical system of justice has broken down.

• The political problem the play dramatises is the question of what Hieronimo
should do after he discovers that the court is responsible for his son’s death.
Should he take revenge or be patient and wait for God to punish vice? Is
revenge a duty or a sin? And who is to authorise such bloody action?
Essentially, these are questions of action, questions about how human beings
should act when faced by intolerable situations.
• Protestant Reformation
• -had placed a new kind of respon- sibility on the individual for making
decisions about moral behaviour
• Protestantism focused on the conscience of the individ- ual, but
conscience alone,
The play dramatised a central crisis of the Renaissance as the era shifted
from the old certainties of the medieval world to the new priorities of the
early modern world. But what the play also shows is the kind of violent cost
there was in this process of change. There was, of course, violence in the
medieval era, but the vio- lence we witness in the revenge tragedies,
inaugurated by The Spanish Tragedy, involves not only that directed against
other people but also a violent rendering of the human subject.
The best-known example of this violent splitting of the human being is
Shakespeare’s character Hamlet, but Hieronimo, too, suffers a kind of
madness in grief. The seismic shift in the Renaissance is towards this
discovery that the world inside human beings is just as complicated and just
as chaotic as the world outside.
Oter great revenge tragedies:
The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) by Thomas Middleton (or possibly Cyril Tourneur),
The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1617) by John Webster,
Women Beware Women (1621) and The Changeling (1622), again by Middleton,
and John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s A Whore (1633).
These are the major revenge plays, but we can add Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus to
the list, together with Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy and George Chapman’s The
Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois, both performed around 1611
As the revenge formula was reworked, it changed, with dramatists ready to exploit the
new opportunities afforded by indoor staging to create macabre scenes of gothic
darkness:
The Duchess of Malfi where the Duchess’s brother Ferdinand hands her a dead man’s
hand and shows her the bodies of her dead children and hus- band made out of wax.
The plays hover at the edge of the comic grotesque, sometimes deliberately
overstepping the mark;
The Revenger’s Tragedy where the revenger Vindice dresses the skull of his dead
lover as a courtesan and puts poison on its lips before the Duke kisses it. Not content,
Vindice forces the Duke to watch his bastard son committing incest with his wife even
as he dies.
What begins to become apparent, and is perhaps apparent even as early as
The Spanish Tragedy, is that the violence that marks these plays is only one
aspect of their excess. Everything about the plays is extravagant, sen-
sational, and only just under control. At times the plots become
bewilderingly complicated, as in The Revenger’s Tragedy where Vindice is
hired to kill himself, and where only he, in the final scene, can explain what
has happened
• What we particularly need to note, however, is that the violence of the
revenge plays links them very directly to events outside the the- atre.
There is a sense in which these works seem to be a kind of pre- monition
of the Civil War to come, in which those outside the court will take arms
against it
This is not to say that Hieronimo or Vindice are symbols of parliamentary
opposition to the king. Rather, it is to suggest, as critics have done recently,
that the violence of the revenge plays points forward, and that the plays,
while not necessarily approving of the revenge figures they show, see no
obvious alternatives to their violent actions.
• If we ask what Hamlet or Hieronimo or Vindice should do, how should
they act, there appears to be no answer: in the end they are forced to kill
the king. It is in this sense that the revenge plays seem to embody the
inevitability of political change by force. There is one element missing
from this account so far, which is a recognition of the prominence of
women in Renaissance drama. I
• In Marlowe and Kyd women are type-cast:
Zenocrate is beautiful, while Bel-imperia is fought over by men. Bel-
imperia does, it is true, play a part in Hieronimo’s revenge, just as Lavinia
does in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, but there seems little room in these
plays for women as individuals.
• In The Duchess of Malfi, it is the Duchess who is the play’s tragic centre
and who articulates its main themes of desire and ambition. But in this
case the ambition is not for crowns or territory, as in Tamburlaine, but for
a kind of domestic, pri- vate space in which her family can live beyond
the control of the state.
• In Middleton’s The Changeling it is sexual desire that is central to plight
as she finds herself caught up in the nets of male society. If The Spanish
Tragedy raises the question of how to act in a corrupt society, these later
plays focus on the question of how women are to survive in a world that
restrains and restricts them. The plays look at marriage and love in a
society governed by patriarchal politics and economics.
The tragic deaths of women in Jacobean drama arise not from flaws in their
characters, but from the material circumstances in which they are placed,
where their desires are seen as too threatening to be allowed to continue.
And yet it is clear that the plays approve of these dangerous women and
elicit sympathy for them. As such, the plays reflect a shift taking place in the
Renaissance that involved new thinking about the family and the role of
women.
Set for the most part in Italian courts, Jacobean revenge tragedies prove,
paradoxically, to be just as much about domestic issues as about state
politics, but, in addition, they also testify to the way in which domestic
issues of love, marriage, children and the family were becoming issues of
state politics. As such, they stand at a crucial intersection of cultural change
between older social formations and the modern world.
 Ben Jonson and the masque
• It is not easy to fit Ben Jonson into the pattern of renaissanse
drama but it would be totally misleading to leave him out.
 Ben Jonson
• Jonson was born in london on june 11 1572
• The son of a clergyman
• Educated at westminster school where he quired a good knowledge of
the classics.
• He worked as a bricklayer
• joined the army serving in flanders
• Became an actor and playwright
• In 1598 he was involved in aduel with a fellow actor whom he killed but
managed to escape hanging.
• His influence on English literature is in some ways greater than that of
shakespeare.
• John was first unofficial poet laurate ,being given a pension by james I in
1616
• He published his collected works .raising drama to the status of other
literary texts
• In additional to plays he wrote poetry and ( after his death )his prose work
timber or discoveries ,which discusses poetic and dramatic principles was
published in 1640.
• Jonson is also known for his influence over younger writers.
• In everything he wrote Jonson is likely to strike us deeply conservative
and yet also remarkably innovative.
• Jonson first major play was Everyman in his humour(1598)
• Humour Jonson meant the governing passions of human beings such as
greed and ambition ,passions which he exaggerates for the purpose of
satire.
• Renaissance and medieval physiology ,a humour was bodily fluid excess
of one particular fluids was felt to unbalance the temperament of people
making them ,For example melancholic or sanguine .
• In Jonson’s plays ,set in the expanding economy ogf london and amongst
its merchant class avarice is nearly always the ruling passion that
dominates ,but folly ,too,is found everywhere .
• At the centre of everyman in his humour is the decitful servant
brainworm, who exploits the jealousy of the merchant kitely and the
credulity of his [Link] figures include a cowardly boasting
soldier ,Bobadill.
• Merchant Kitely - suspects that his brother in law wellbred and his friends
have sexual designs on his wife and on his bridget.
• Brain worm - tricks all the parties into meeting at the house of a water bearer
where cofusion and misunderstanding reign until clement restores order.
“The play is a characteristic piece by jonson ‘’
• combining satire
• knock about farce
• Jonson’s seems to be a comic world that is informed in very simple way
by a recognition of humankinds prospensity for foolishness .
• Underlying the plays ,however is a darker premise that people are
greedy,lustful,liars ,and that society is government by vice rather than by
virtue.
• This is evident in the form of his plays ,particularly sehis tragedies such as
• Sejanus - which conform to the classical unities of time ,place, and action
restricting what can be shown so that it corresponds with what is probable.
• Puritans -being equally distrustful of the power of the stage decieve.
• Jonson also delights in the mad behaviour of those on stage , as he
manipulates everything towards impossible situations only to resolve them
at the last moment.
• This is the evident in his great comic dramas.
• volpone 1605 ,The Alchemist (1610)and bartholomew fair(1614)which
exploit to the full idea of people driven by humours.
• volpone
- Pretends to be near death
- His would be heirs and friends visit him ,hoping to gain from his will.
- Overreaches himself
 -He leaves everything to mosca and pretend to die but mosca blackmails
him.
• Volpone - goes be He lefore the court to confess all and is
punished by being cast in irons .
• volpone - becomes ever more complicated as the pace increases
to a kind of frenzy until all is resolved by the return of love
wit ,the owner of the house where the action has taken place.
• The play satirises the greedy folly of humankind as does
• The Archemist - the plot turns upon the desires of the characters for
instant wealth based on the pseudo- scientific hope that base metal can be
turned into gold.
• Brtholomew fair - set at the annual fair in smithfield london ,where the
public are duped or dupe themselves.
• Puritans - are exposed as hypocrites ,wives turn into prostitutes ,and
justice overdo ,the overseer of law and order is arrested as a criminal.
• On the surface the play is about the ridiculousness of vice ,but its self -
conscious artifice steers it towards a carnivalesque celebration of
[Link] such ,and paradoxically .
• Jonson’s satire seems to celebrate behaviour that falls outside the scope of
the social and the restrained .the result it is a certain ambivalence about
the social order.
 Masque
• Masque - were fashionable at court ,especially during the reign of james
[Link] were specular entertainments combining
verse ,music ,dancing ,disguises,and visual effects .They were performed
indoors ,often by professionals ,while the masques were played by
members of the court.
• Masques - nearly always ended with dancing ,with both spectators and the
courtly masques involved but not the actors.
• The plot was usually symbolic ,with virtue tiumphing over vice.
• Miltons comus (16340) where the lady resists the sexual temptation of
pogan god comus and preserves her virginity.
• Comus - however has little of the spectacle that normally accompanies the
masque and so could also be described as a pastoral drama, comus
disquising himself as a shepherd ,as do the ladys brothers in thier
attempt ,a burlesque or parody of the main masques.
• It was Jonson who established the masque as a definite form .
• He liked to add an anti - masque at the beginning, a berleques or parody
the main masque.
• This fits in with the pattern of jonson comic writing ,in that
the the purpose of the anti - masque was satiric while the main masque
was stiric while the main masque was educative and [Link]
example ,the masque of queen anne,the wife of james I and her ladies.
• They represent the moral virtues as opposed to the witches who stand for
the world of evil.
• The tansition in the masque is accomplished by the use of stage
machinery. The world of hell disappears on stage to be replaced by a
building representing the house of fame.
• The machinery and building were designed by inigo jones ,the architect
who was also the famous of the masque designers who worked with
Jonson.
• They were intended as entertainments for the court but they were also
meant to glorify the court as ideal ,orderly and virtous.
• The lack of dialogue between the common actors and the silent
courtiers ,however seem to symbolize the rift between the court and the
commonworld outside a rift that ,with the accession of james and then his
son charles was to develop into political confrontation
• There is a way in which the masque as a form seems to have deen
designed almost in opposition to the public drama ,and while the public
drama moved towards
• kind of realism
• court
• myth
• illusion
• The invention by Inigo Jones of movable scenery and all use of elaborate
machinery was,however tohave a lasting effect on drama.
• Ironically when the theatres reopened after the civil war it was the court
style which was to dominant ,not the public arena theatre .
• The cout may have been deluded in its self emage but it was jonson and
and jones design that designs that were to hold sway rather than
shakespeares globe with its open stage and minimal scenes.
 Restoration Drama
• In 1660-1700 charles II returned to england from france following the end of
oliver cromwells commonwealth and the re-establishment of the monarchy.
• charles I had beebn executed in 1649 and from that date until 1660 england
had been a commonwealth ,with cromwell as lord protector.
• The returning court was heavily influenced by french fashion and
ideas ,especially by a more secular view of the world.
• In additional ,there were also other changes taking place outside the court
which gave new tone to life.
• Major events like the great plague the fire of london and the founding of the royal society
for science.
• Theaters from open -air to indoor venues with movable scenery.
key play wrights of the restoration period.
• john dryden
• Etherege
• Farquar
• wycherley
• Congreeve and aphra behn.
Main types of plays during the restoration
• Operas
• heroic tragedies
• comedies
• first category Fairly bombastic pieces
• second category Merits Attention
• These tend to be plays showing a hero choosing between love, and
honour ,and are set in faraway romantic setting.
• John Dry den’s tragedies ,however especially
• All for love (1677 are writing of shakespeares Antony and cleoptra
• Dryden’s - cuts back the scope of shakespeares play bring action within
the confines of neo -classical taste.
 Restoration Drama
• Restoration -whereas the Renaissance seemsto take the whole world as its
canvas with the restoration of the whole monarchy there comes about an
urge to confine ,limit and order life.
• Also known as comedy of manners plays thsese are known for their
explicit depictations.
 Types of Restoration Drama
• COMEDY OF MANNERS
• The way of the world by william congreve
• The country wife by william wycherley
• The man of mode by george Etherege
• Restoration comedies- with their mixture of social types offer us an
impression of the changing nature of fashionable society ,but they also
reveal the fragility of the venue of civilised behaviour.
 Types of restoration drama
• The conquest of granada
• All for love and aurang zebe by john dryden
• Venice preserved and the orphan by thomas otway
• Struggle between love and honor
• His first play was The Forced Marriage (1670)
• Second The Rover(1677-81)that she is best know
• The plays takes place at carnival time ad in line with both restoration and
romantic [Link] the love affairs of a series of parallel couples .
 Characters in The Rover
• Penniless willmore love by hellena .
• he how ever desires the rich courtesan Angelica Bianca,
• Seduces her and then leaves her to many hellena
• hellena’s sister ,florinda who is saved at the last minute by
valeria ,hellena’skinswoman.
• The other couples pair off ,apart from the foolish blunt who is duped by a
[Link] revenge for his injured manhood ,he threatens to rape.
• it is cold moment in the play ,and suggests how restoration comedy often
lets slip the mask of the social world to reveal something more brutal .
• it is this as much as anything that the restoration period perhaps signals
that in the world after the civil war,any kind of social order can only be a
disguise or mask which cannot really hide the harsh realities that underlie
the pretence of social or political order.