Introductory: Elizabethan and Foreign Models

Concerning the origins of Restoration comedy, and of that particular kind to which has been given the title “comedy of manners,” violently divergent views have been expressed. There have been many to argue that in effect these plays were inspired and largely moulded by the comic drama of Paris as that was fashioned into the peerless form it assumed in the hands of Molière; others have affirmed that what we have here is a unique artistic development, owing little either to the French theatre or to earlier English endeavour, a thing summoned forth from the society that took its cue from the Merry Monarch; still others have sought to prove that essentially the comic endeavour of dramatists from Dryden to Congreve shows a logical progress from the comic trends fully evident in the plays which were being produced in the decades before the theatres were closed by Puritan ordinance in 1642.

Fortunately, the past few years have seen the appearance of a number of specialised studies devoted to this subject, and through these not only have the basic facts been more clearly established but also a surer approach towards the interpretation of these facts has been rendered possible.

Of one thing there can be now not the slightest doubt: Restoration comedy owes a tremendous debt, indeed its greatest debt, to the drama produced in England from the time of Jonson to that of Shirley.