poems ‘Orinda’, to which members of her literary circle added the epithet ‘the
matchless’. A neo-classical criticism was imported, with ‘rules’ requiring the three
‘unities’ of action, place and time: that the action should happen in one place in no
more than three hours. Except in The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest,
Shakespeare had ignored these rules, but they are worth understanding. The critics
turned Aristotle’s point that most good tragedies have a single plot into a rule; and
added the unities of place and time. These doctrines are economically put by Dryden
in his prologue to his play Secret Love (1665):
He who wrote this, not without pains and thought
From French and English Theaters has brought
Th’exactest Rules by which a Play is wrought:
The Unities of Action, Place and Time;
The Scenes unbroken; and a mingled Chime
OfJohnsons humour, with Corneilles rhyme. i.e. Ben Jonson’s
Drama now tried to be purely comic or purely tragic, and critics also embraced
Aristotle’s commendation of artistic unity, singleness of effect and philosophic
truth. To his doctrine that art should imitate the permanent traits in human nature,
they added the principle that it should show virtue rewarded. These aims are irrec-
oncilable in tragedy. In Nahum Tate’s 1681 version ofKing Lear, Cordelia survives to
marry Edgar. Johnson, writing on Lear in 1765, approved:
A play in which the wicked prosper and the virtuous miscarry may doubtless be good
because it is a just representation of the common events of human life: but since all
reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot easily be persuaded that the
observation of justice makes a play worse; or that if other excellencies are equal the
audience will not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of persecuted virtue.
In the present case the public has decided. Cordelia from the time of Tate has always
retired with victory and felicity.
Shakespeare leaves Edgar and Albany to sustain ‘the gored state’, but in 1681
England was still a gored state; Charles’s legitimate heir was his strong-minded
brother. The only neo-classical tragedy whose appeal survived the 18th century was
Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d (1682).Restoration comedy
Restoration comedy showed the seamy sexual side of the smooth social world. The
leading comic writers of Charles’s reign were Sir George Etherege (?1634–?1691) and
William Wycherley (1641–1716); among the second rank is Aphra Behn
(1640–1689), the first woman to make a living by her pen. The wit and teasing
amoralism of these comedies was by 1700 found gross, and it changed: Sir John
Vanburgh (1654–1726) is lighter, William Congreve (1670–1729) more polished,
George Farquhar (?1677–1707) more genial – trends which continued in the 18th
century. Charles Lamb (1775–1834) argued that the artificial comedy of the
Restoration, no longer staged in the early 19th century, had nothing to do with real
life. The Victorian historian T. B. Macaulay found it immoral; the 20th-century critic
L.C. Knights found it dull; today it amuses once more, though the sex-comedy of
the 1670s is more bawdy than witty.
Restoration comedy takes a pleasure in the vices it caricatures: it shows ‘the way
we live now’, pushing current trends to logical extremes. The hero of Wycherley’s The168 5 · STUART LITERATURE: TO 1700