User:Michael Morrone

18th Century and Restoration:

Main Authors of 18th Century theater:

John Dryden: After the Restoration, Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day and he transferred his allegiances to the new government. Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden welcomed the new regime with two more panegyrics; To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662), and To My Lord Chancellor (1662). These poems suggest that Dryden was looking to court a possible patron, but he was to instead make a living in writing for publishers, not for the aristocracy, and thus ultimately for the reading public. These, and his other nondramatic poems, are occasional— that is, they celebrate public events. Thus they are written for the nation rather than the self, and the Poet Laureate (as he would later become) is obliged to write a certain number of these per annum.[5] In November 1662 Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society, and he was elected an early fellow. However, Dryden was inactive in Society affairs and in 1666 was expelled for non-payment of his dues. Portrait of John Dryden by James Maubert, circa 1695 Portrait of John Dryden by Godfrey Kneller, 1698

On 1 December 1663 Dryden married the royalist sister of Sir Robert Howard—Lady Elizabeth. Dryden’s works occasionally contain outbursts against the married state but also celebrations of the same. Thus, little is known of the intimate side of his marriage. Lady Elizabeth however, was to bear him three sons and outlive him.

With the reopening of the theatres after the Puritan ban, Dryden busied himself with the composition of plays. His first play, The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663 and was not successful, but he was to have more success, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he was also to become a shareholder. During the 1660s and 70s theatrical writing was to be his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best known work being Marriage A-la-Mode (1672), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678). Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the events of 1666; the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670).

George Etherege George Etherege, a Londoner who lived between 1636 and 1689, deserves to hold a more distinguished place in dramatic literature than has generally been allotted to him. In a dull and heavy age, he inaugerated a period of genuine wit and sprightliness; he invented the comedy of intrigue, and led the way for the masterpieces of Congreve and Sheridan. Before his time the manner of Ben Jonson had prevailed in comedy, and traditional "humours" and typical eccentricities, instead of real characters, had crowded the comic stage. Etherege paints with a light, faint hand, but it is from nature, and his portraits of fops and beaux are simply unexcelled. No one knows better than he how to present a gay young gentleman, "an unconfinable rover after amorous adventures." His genius is as light as thistledown; he is frivolous, without force of conviction, without principle; but his wit is sparkling, and his style pure and singularly picturesque. No one approaches Etherege in delicate touches of scene and description; he makes the fine airs of London gentlemen and ladies live before our eyes even more vividly than Congreve; but he has less insight and less energy than Congreve. Had he been poor or ambitious he might have been to England almost what Molière was to France, but he was a rich man living at his ease, and he disdained to excel in literature. He was a scion of an ancient and distinguished Oxfordshire family, and was educated at Cambridge, but left the university early to travel in France and Flanders, returning to London to enter one of the Inns of Court. His tastes were those of a fine gentleman, and he indulged freely in pleasure, especially the pleasures of the cup. Soon after the Restoration he composed his comedy of The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub, which was brought out in the Duke's theatre in 1664, and printed in the same year. It is partly in rhymed heroic verse, but it contains comic scenes that are exceedingly bright and fresh, with a style of wit hitherto unknown upon the English stage. The success of the play was very great, but Etherege waited four years before he repeated his experiment, meanwhile gaining the highest reputation as a poetical beau, and moving in the circle of Sir Charles Sedley, Lord Rochester, and other noble wits of the day.