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Restoration literature

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Literature types

   Charles II of England.
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   Charles II of England.

   Restoration literature is the literature written in English during the
   period commonly referred to as the English Restoration (1660 - 1689),
   corresponding with the last years of the direct Stuart reign in
   England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to
   denote roughly homogeneous styles of literature that centre on a
   celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a
   literature that includes extremes, for it encloses both Paradise Lost
   and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of
   The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw
   Locke's Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the
   experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical
   attacks on theaters from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary
   criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. It saw news become a
   commodity, the essay develop into a periodical artform, the beginnings
   of textual criticism, and the emergence of the stock market.

   The dates for "Restoration literature" are a matter of convention, and
   they differ markedly from genre to genre. Thus, the "Restoration" in
   drama may last until 1700, while in poetry it may last only until 1666
   and the annus mirabilis, and in prose it might end in 1688, with the
   increasing tensions over succession and the corresponding rise in
   journalism and periodicals or not until 1700, when those periodicals
   grew more stabilized. In general, the term "Restoration" is used to
   denote the literature that began and flourished due to Charles II,
   whether that literature was the laudatory ode that gained a new life
   with restored aristocracy or the eschatological literature that showed
   an increasing despair among Puritans, or the literature of rapid
   communication and trade that followed in the wake of England's
   mercantile empire.
   Charles II being given the first pineapple grown in England by his
   gardener, John Rose. Note also the Cavalier King Charles Spaniels in
   the foreground.
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   Charles II being given the first pineapple grown in England by his
   gardener, John Rose. Note also the Cavalier King Charles Spaniels in
   the foreground.

Historical context

   During the Interregnum, England had been dominated by Puritan
   literature and the intermittent presence of official censorship (see,
   for example, Milton's Areopagitica and his later retraction of that
   statement). While some of the Puritan ministers of Oliver Cromwell
   wrote poetry that was elaborate and carnal (e.g. Andrew Marvell's
   "Mower" poems and To His Coy Mistress), such poetry was not published.
   Similarly, some of the poets who published with the Restoration
   produced their poetry during the Interregnum. However, the official
   break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist
   standards effectively created a gap in literary tradition. At the time
   of the English Civil War, poetry had been dominated by Metaphysical
   poetry of the John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Lovelace sort.
   Drama had developed the late Elizabethan theatre traditions and had
   begun to mount increasingly topical and political plays (the drama, for
   example, of Thomas Middleton). However, the Interregnum put a stop, or
   at least a caesura to these lines of influence and allowed a seemingly
   fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration.

   The last years of the Interregnum were turbulent, as the last years of
   the Restoration period would be, and those who did not go into exile
   were called upon to change their religious beliefs more than once. With
   each religious preference came a different sort of literature, both in
   prose and poetry (the theaters were closed during the Interregnum).
   When Cromwell himself died and his son, Richard Cromwell, threatened to
   become Lord Protector, politicians and public figures scrambled to show
   themselves allies or enemies of the new regime. Printed literature was
   dominated by odes in poetry, and religious writing in prose. The
   industry of religious tract writing, despite official efforts, did not
   reduce its output. Figures such as the founder of the Society of
   Friends, George Fox, were jailed by the Cromwellian authorities and
   published at hazard.

   During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of
   Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II and
   conducted a brisk business in intelligence and fund-raising for an
   eventual return to England. Some of the royalist ladies installed
   themselves in convents in Holland and France, and these convents
   offered safe haven for indigent and travelling nobles and allies. The
   men similarly stationed themselves in Holland and France, with the
   court-in-exile being established in The Hague before setting up more
   permanently in Paris. The nobility who travelled with (and later
   travelled to) Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the
   midst of the continent's literary scene. However, as Holland and France
   in the 17th century were little alike, so the influences picked up by
   courtiers in exile and the travellers who sent intelligence and money
   to them were not monolithic. Charles spent his time attending plays in
   France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living
   in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the
   tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially
   tolerant nation. John Bramhall, for example, had been a strongly high
   church theologian, and yet, in exile, he debated willingly with Thomas
   Hobbes and came into the Restored church as tolerant in practice as he
   was severe in argument. Courtiers also received an exposure to the
   Roman Catholic Church and its liturgy and pageants, as well as, to a
   lesser extent, Italian poetry.

The Restoration and its initial reaction

   Charles II.
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   Charles II.

   When Charles II came to the throne in 1660, the sense of novelty in all
   forms of literature was tempered by a sense of suddenly participating
   in European literature in a way that England had not before. One of
   Charles's first moves was to reopen the theaters and to grant letters
   patent giving mandates for the theatre owners and managers. Thomas
   Killigrew received one of the patents, opening the first patent theatre
   at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane; William Davenant received the other,
   opening his patent theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Drama was public
   and a matter of royal concern, and therefore both theaters were charged
   with producing a certain number of old plays, and Davenant was charged
   with presenting material that would be morally uplifting. Additionally,
   the position of Poet Laureate was recreated, complete with payment by a
   barrel of "sack" ( brandy), and the requirement for birthday odes.

   Charles II was a man who prided himself on his wit and his worldliness.
   He was well known as a philanderer as well. Consequently, highly witty,
   playful, and sexually wise poetry had court sanction. Additionally,
   Charles, and the Duke of York (the future James II of England), were
   sponsors of mathematics and natural philosophy, and so, again, spirited
   skepticism and investigation into nature were favored by the court.
   Charles II sponsored the Royal Society, and courtiers were eager to
   join the Royal Society (for example, the noted diarist Samuel Pepys was
   a member), just as Royal Society members moved in court. Charles and
   his court had also learned the lessons of exile, and so, although
   Charles was High church (and secretly vowing to convert to Roman
   Catholicism on his death) and James, Duke of York was crypto-Catholic,
   Charles's policy was to be generally tolerant of religious and
   political dissenters. While Charles II did have his own version of the
   Test Act, he was slow to jail or persecute Puritans, preferring merely
   to keep them from public office (and therefore to try to rob them of
   their Parliamentary positions). As a consequence, the prose literature
   of dissent, political theory, and economics increased in Charles II's
   reign.

   The general first reaction to Charles's return was for authors to move
   in two directions. On the one hand, there was an attempt at recovering
   the English literature of the Jacobean period, as if there had been no
   disruption, but, on the other, there was a powerful sense of novelty,
   and authors approached Gallic models of literature and elevated the
   literature of wit (particularly satire and parody). The novelty would
   show in the literature of skeptical inquiry, and the Gallicism would
   show in the introduction of Neoclassicism into English writing and
   criticism.

Top-down history

   The Restoration is an unusual historical period, as its literature is
   bounded by a specific political event: the restoration of the Stuart
   monarchy. It is unusual in another way, as well, for it is a time when
   the influence of that king's presence and personality permeated
   literary society to such an extent that, almost uniquely, literature
   reflects the court. The adversaries of the restoration, the Puritans
   and democrats and republicans, similarly respond to the peculiarities
   of the king and the king's personality. Therefore, a top-down view of
   the literary history of the Restoration has more validity than that of
   most literary epochs. "The Restoration" as a critical concept covers
   the duration of the effect of Charles and Charles's manner. This effect
   extended beyond his death, in some instances, and not as long as his
   life, in others.

Poetry

   The Restoration was an age of poetry. Not only was poetry the most
   popular form of literature, but it was also the most significant form
   of literature, as poems affected political events and immediately
   reflected the times. It was, to its own people, an age dominated only
   by the king, and not by any single genius. Throughout the period, the
   lyric, ariel, historical, and epic poem was being developed.

The English epic

   Even without the introduction of Neo-classical criticism, English poets
   were aware that they had no national epic. Edmund Spenser's Faerie
   Queene was well known, but England, unlike France with Song of Roland
   or Spain with El Cid or, most of all, Italy with Aeneid, had no epic
   poem of national origins. Several poets attempted to supply this void.
   William D'Avenant, operator of the first playhouse opened after the
   Restoration, was also a playwright and an epic poet.
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   William D'Avenant, operator of the first playhouse opened after the
   Restoration, was also a playwright and an epic poet.

   William D'Avenant was the first Restoration poet to attempt an epic.
   His Gondibert was of epic length, and it was admired by Hobbes.
   However, it also used the ballad form, and other poets, as well as
   critics, were very quick to condemn this rhyme scheme as unflattering
   and unheroic (Dryden Epic). The prefaces to Gondibert show the struggle
   for a formal epic structure, as well as how the early Restoration saw
   themselves in relation to Classical literature.

   Although today he is studied separately from the Restoration, John
   Milton's Paradise Lost was published during the Restoration. Milton no
   less than D'avenant wished to write the English epic. He chose blank
   verse as his form. However, Milton rejected the cause of English
   exceptionalism. His Paradise Lost seeks to tell the story of all
   mankind, and his pride is in Christianity rather than Englishness.

   Significantly, Milton began with an attempt at writing an epic on King
   Arthur, for that was the matter of English national founding. While
   Milton rejected that subject, in the end, others made the attempt.
   Richard Blackmore wrote both a Prince Arthur and King Arthur. Both
   attempts were long, soporific, and failed both critically and
   popularly. Indeed, the poetry was so slow that the author became known
   as "Never-ending Blackmore" (see Alexander Pope's lambasting of
   Blackmore in The Dunciad).

   The Restoration period ended without an English epic. Beowulf may now
   be called the English epic, but the work was unknown to Restoration
   authors, and Old English was incomprehensible to them.

Lyric poetry, pastoral poetry, ariel verse, and odes

   Lyric poetry, where the poet speaks of his or her own feelings in the
   first person and expresses a mood, was not especially common in the
   Restoration period. Poets expressed their points of view in other
   forms, usually public or formally disguised poetic forms, such as odes,
   pastoral poetry, and ariel verse. One of the characteristics of the
   period is its devaluation of individual sentiment and psychology in
   favour of public utterance and philosophy. The sorts of lyric poetry
   found later in the Churchyard Poets would, in the Restoration, only
   exist as pastorals.

   Formally, the Restoration period had a preferred rhyme scheme. Rhyming
   couplets in iambic pentameter was by far the most popular structure for
   poetry of all types. Neo-Classicism meant that poets attempted
   adaptations of Classical meters, but the rhyming couplet in iambic
   pentameter held a near monopoly. According to Dryden ("Preface to The
   Conquest of Grenada"), the rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter has the
   right restraint and dignity for a lofty subject, and its rhyme allowed
   for a complete, coherent statement to be made. Dryden was struggling
   with the issue of what later critics in the Augustan period would call
   "decorum": the fitness of form to subject (q.v. Dryden Epic). It is the
   same struggle that Davenant faced in his Gondibert. Dryden's solution
   was a closed couplet in iambic pentameter that would have a minimum of
   enjambment. This form was called the "heroic couplet," because it was
   suitable for heroic subjects. Additionally, the age also developed the
   mock-heroic couplet. After 1672 and Samuel Butler's Hudibras, iambic
   tetrameter couplets with unusual or unexpected rhymes became known as
   "Hudibrastic verse." It was a formal parody of heroic verse, and it was
   primarily used for satire. Jonathan Swift would use the Hudibrastic
   form almost exclusively for his poetry.

   Although Dryden's reputation is greater today, contemporaries saw the
   1670s and 1680s as being the age of courtier poets in general, and
   Edmund Waller was as praised as any. Dryden, Rochester, Buckingham, and
   Dorset dominated verse, and all were attached to the court of Charles.
   Aphra Behn, Matthew Prior, and Robert Gould, on the other hand, were
   outsiders who were profoundly royalist. The court poets follow no one
   particular style, except that they all show sexual awareness, a
   willingness to satirize, and a dependence upon wit to dominate their
   opponents. Each of these poets wrote for the stage as well as the page.
   Of these, Behn, Dryden, Rochester, and Gould deserve some separate
   mention.
   John Dryden.
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   John Dryden.

   Dryden was prolific. Indeed, he was accused of "plagiarizing from
   himself," he wrote so well and quickly. Both before and after his
   Laureateship, he wrote public odes. He attempted the Jacobean pastoral
   along the lines of Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney, but his greatest
   successes and fame came from his attempts at apologetics for the
   restored court and the Established Church. His Absalom and Achitophel
   and Religio Laici both served the King directly by making controversial
   royal actions seem reasonable. He also pioneered the mock-heroic.
   Although Samuel Butler had invented the mock-heroic in English with
   Hudibras (written during the Interregnum but published in the
   Restoration), Dryden's MacFlecknoe set up the satirical parody. Dryden
   was himself not of noble blood, and he was never awarded the honours
   that he had been promised by the King (nor was he repaid the loans he
   had made to the King), but he did as much as any peer to serve Charles
   II. Even when James II came to the throne and Roman Catholicism was on
   the rise, Dryden attempted to serve the court, and his The Hind and the
   Panther praised the Roman church above all others. After that point,
   Dryden suffered for his conversions, and he was the victim of many
   satires.
   The Earl of Rochester, famous as the model rake. Not long before his
   death.
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   The Earl of Rochester, famous as the model rake. Not long before his
   death.

   Buckingham wrote some court poetry, but he, like Dorset, was a patron
   of poetry more than a poet. On the other hand, Rochester was a prolix
   and outrageous poet. Rochester's poetry is almost always sexually frank
   and is frequently political. Inasmuch as the Restoration came after the
   Interregnum, the very sexual explicitness of Rochester's verse was a
   political statement and a thumb in the eye of Puritans. His poetry
   often assumes a lyric pose, as he pretends to write in sadness over his
   own impotence ("The Disabled Debauchee") or sexual conquests, but most
   of Rochester's poetry is a parody of an existing,
   Classically-authorized form. He has a mock topographical poem ("Ramble
   in St James Park"), which is about the dangers of darkness for a man
   intent on copulation and the historical compulsion of that plot of
   ground as a place for fornication, several mock odes ("To Signore
   Dildo," concerning the public burning of a crate of "contraband" from
   France on the London docks), and mock pastorals. Rochester's interest
   was in inversion, disruption, and the superiority of wit as much as it
   was in hedonism. Rochester's venality led to an early death, and he was
   later frequently invoked as the exemplar of a Restoration rake.
   Aphra Behn, "the first female professional author in English," not many
   years before her death.
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   Aphra Behn, "the first female professional author in English," not many
   years before her death.

   Aphra Behn has been unjustly called "the female Rochester." While she
   was best known publicly for her drama (in the 1670s, only Dryden's
   plays were staged more often than hers), she wrote a great deal of
   poetry that would be the basis of her later reputation. Edward Bysshe
   would include numerous quotes from her verse in his Art of English
   Poetry (see online text at UVA). While her poetry was occasionally
   sexually frank, it was never as graphic or intentionally lurid and
   titillating as Rochester's. Rather, her poetry was, like the court's
   ethos, playful and honest about sexual desire. One of the most
   remarkable aspects of Behn's success in court poetry, however, is that
   Behn was herself a commoner. She had no more relation to peers than
   Dryden, and possibly quite a bit less. As a woman, a commoner, and
   Kentish, she is remarkable for her success in moving in the same
   circles as the King himself. She was likely a spy for the Royalist side
   during the Interregnum, and she was certainly a spy for Charles II in
   the Second Anglo-Dutch War, but she had neither exceptional beauty nor
   any wealth at all (indeed, she may have spent time in debtor's prison),
   and her ability to write poetry that stands among the best of the age
   gives some lie to the notion that the Restoration was an age of female
   illiteracy and verse composed and read only by peers.
   Title page to Robert Gould's 1690 Love Given O'er, the "Satire on
   Woman."
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   Title page to Robert Gould's 1690 Love Given O'er, the "Satire on
   Woman."

   If Behn is a curious exception to the rule of noble verse, Robert Gould
   breaks that rule altogether. Gould was born of a common family and
   orphaned at the age of thirteen. He had no schooling at all and worked
   as a domestic servant, first as a footman and then, probably, in the
   pantry. However, he was attached to the Earl of Dorset's household, and
   Gould somehow learned to read and write, as well as to possibly read
   and write Latin . In the 1680s and 1690s, Gould's poetry was very
   popular. He attempted to write odes for money, but his great success
   came with Love Given O'er, or A Satyr Upon ... Woman in 1692. It was a
   partial adaptation of a satires of Juvenal, but with an immense amount
   of explicit invective against women. The misogyny in this poem is some
   of the harshest and most visceral in English poetry: the poem sold out
   all editions. Gould also wrote a Satyr on the Play House (reprinted in
   Montagu Sommers's The London Stage) with detailed descriptions of the
   actions and actors involved in the Restoration stage. He followed the
   success of Love Given O'er with a series of misogynistic poems, all of
   which have specific, graphic, and witty denunciations of female
   behaviour. His poetry has " virgin" brides who, upon their wedding
   nights, have "the straight gate so wide/ It's been leapt by all
   mankind," noblewomen who have money but prefer to pay the coachman with
   oral sex, and noblewomen having sex in their coaches and having the
   cobblestones heighten their pleasures. Gould's career was brief, but
   his success was not a novelty of subliterary misogyny. After Dryden's
   conversion to Roman Catholicism, Gould even engaged in a poison pen
   battle with the Laureate. His "Jack Squab" (the Laureate getting paid
   with squab as well as sack and implying that Dryden would sell his soul
   for a dinner) attacked Dryden's faithlessness viciously, and Dryden and
   his friends replied. That a footman even could conduct a verse war is
   remarkable. That he did so without, apparently, any prompting from his
   patron is astonishing.

Other poets (translations, controversialists, etc.)

   Roger L'Estrange (per above) was a significant translator, and he also
   produced verse translations. Others, such as Richard Blackmore, were
   admired for their "sentence" (declamation and sentiment) but have not
   been remembered. Also, Elkannah Settle was, in the Restoration, a
   lively and promising political satirist, though his reputation has not
   fared well since his day. After booksellers began hiring authors and
   sponsoring specific translations, the shops filled quickly with poetry
   from hirelings. Similarly, as periodical literature began to assert
   itself as a political force, a number of now anonymous poets produced
   topical, specifically occasional verse.

   The largest and most important form of incunabula of the era, however,
   was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously.
   There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one
   hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a
   satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece
   that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy
   individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the
   suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set
   upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on
   Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems,
   some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown. In
   particular, political satires against The Cabal, against Sunderland's
   government, and, most especially, against James II's rumored conversion
   to Roman Catholicism, are uncollected. However, such poetry was a vital
   part of the vigorous Restoration scene, and it was an age of energetic
   and voluminous satire.

Prose genres

   Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious
   writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that
   would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing
   often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political
   and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion.

Philosophical writing

   The Restoration saw the publication of a number of significant pieces
   of political and philosophical writing that had been spurred by the
   actions of the Interregnum. Additionally, the court's adoption of
   Neo-classicism and empirical science led to a receptiveness toward
   significant philosophical works.
   Frontispiece to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society, 1667.
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   Frontispiece to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society, 1667.

   Thomas Sprat wrote his History of the Royal Society in 1667 and set
   forth, in a single document, the goals of empirical science ever after.
   He expressed grave suspicions of adjectives, nebulous terminology, and
   all language that might be subjective. He praised a spare, clean, and
   precise vocabulary for science and explanations that are as
   comprehensible as possible. In Sprat's account, the Royal Society
   explicitly rejected anything that seemed like Scholasticism. For Sprat,
   as for a number of the founders of the Royal Society, science was
   Protestant: its reasons and explanations had to be comprehensible to
   all. There would be no priests in science, and anyone could reproduce
   the experiments and hear their lessons. Similarly, he emphasized the
   need for conciseness in description, as well as reproducibility of
   experiments.
   Image of a flea from Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665), a Royal
   Society work.
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   Image of a flea from Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665), a Royal
   Society work.

   William Temple, after he retired from being what today would be called
   Secretary of State, wrote a number of bucolic prose works in praise of
   retirement, contemplation, and direct observation of nature. He also
   brought the Ancients and Moderns quarrel into English with his
   Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning. The debates that followed
   in the wake of this quarrel would inspire many of the major authors of
   the first half of the 18th century (most notably Swift and Alexander
   Pope).

   The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his
   philosophical works. Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding
   the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper
   manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led
   Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the
   thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding,
   Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more
   elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of
   the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy
   overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited
   monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be
   satisfying.

Religious writing

   The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing,
   but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as
   John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those
   Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who
   had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the
   regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent
   writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in
   the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration.

   Fox, and William Penn, made public vows of pacifism and preached a new
   theology of peace and love. Other Puritans contented themselves with
   being able to meet freely and act on local parishes. They distanced
   themselves from the harshest sides of their religion that had led to
   the abuses of Cromwell's reign. Two religious authors stand out beyond
   the others in this time: John Bunyan and Izaak Walton.

   Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of personal salvation
   and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology
   or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual
   saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that
   threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative
   and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also
   shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund
   Spenser.
   Title page to Walton's The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative man's
   Recreation.
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   Title page to Walton's The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative man's
   Recreation.

   Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler is similarly introspective.
   Ostensibly, his book is a guide to fishing, but readers treasured its
   contents for their descriptions of nature and serenity. There are few
   analogs to this prose work. On the surface, it appears to be in the
   tradition of other guide books (several of which appeared in the
   Restoration (including Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester, which is
   one of the earliest attempts at settling the rules of card games)),
   but, like Pilgrim's Progress, its main business is guiding the
   individual.

   More court-oriented religious prose included a number of sermon
   collections and a great literature of debate over the convocation and
   issues before the House of Lords. The Act of First Fruits and Fifths,
   the Test Act, the Act of Uniformity, and others engaged the leading
   divines of the day. Robert Boyle, notable as a scientist, also wrote
   his Meditations on God, and this work was immensely popular as
   devotional literature well beyond the Restoration. (Indeed, it is today
   perhaps most famous for Jonathan Swift's parody of it in Meditation
   Upon a Broomstick). Devotional literature in general sold well and
   attests a wide literacy rate among the English middle classes.

Journalism

   During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news
   would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of
   paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event.
   However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and
   periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in
   England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William
   of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design,
   England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from
   Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.

   The early efforts at news sheets and periodicals were spotty. Roger
   L'Estrange produced both The News and City Mercury, but neither of them
   was a sustained effort. Henry Muddiman was the first to succeed in a
   regular news paper with the London Gazette (1667). In 1666, Muddiman
   produced the Oxford Gazette as a digest of news of the royal court,
   which was in Oxford to avoid the plague in London. When the court moved
   back to Whitehall, Muddiman began the London Gazette. Muddiman had
   begun as a journalist in the Interregnum and had been the official
   journalist of the Long Parliament (in the form of The Parliamentary
   Intelligencer). However, even though Muddiman's productions are the
   first regular news accounts, they are still not the first modern
   newspaper, as Muddiman's work was sent in manuscript by post to
   subscribers and was not a printed sheet for general sale to the public.
   That had to wait for The Athenian Mercury.
   A detail of the frontispiece to The Athenian Oracle, a collection of
   The Athenian Mercury.
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   A detail of the frontispiece to The Athenian Oracle, a collection of
   The Athenian Mercury.

   Sporadic essays combined with news had been published throughout the
   Restoration period, but The Athenian Mercury was the first regularly
   published periodical in England. John Dunton and the "Athenian Society"
   (actually a mathematician, minister, and philosopher paid by Dunton for
   their work) began publishing in 1691, just after the reign of William
   and Mary began. In addition to news reports, The Athenian Mercury
   allowed readers to send in questions anonymously and receive a printed
   answer. The questions mainly dealt with love and health, but there were
   some bizarre and intentionally amusing questions as well (e.g. a
   question on why a person shivers after urination, written in rhyming
   couplets). The questions section allowed the journal to sell well and
   to be profitable. Therefore, it ran for six years, produced four books
   that spun off from the columns, and then received a bound publication
   as The Athenian Oracle.

   The Athenian Mercury set the stage for the later Spectator, Gray's Inn
   Journal, Temple Bar Journal, and scores of politically oriented
   journals, such as the original The Guardian, The Observer, The
   Freeholder, Mist's Journal, and many others. Also, The Athenian Mercury
   published poetry from contributors, and it was the first to publish the
   poetry of Jonathan Swift and Elizabeth Singer Rowe. The trend of
   newspapers would similarly explode in coming years, and it would turn
   out that a number of papers had runs of a single day and be composed
   entirely as a method of planting political attacks (as Pope called them
   "Sons of a day" in Dunciad B).

Fiction

   It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in
   English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to
   distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the
   Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France
   and Spain was popular in England. Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso
   engendered a number of prose narratives of love, peril, and revenge,
   and Gauthier de Costes, seigneur de la Calprenède's novels were quite
   popular during the Interregnum and beyond.

   The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with
   reading "novels" as a vice. Inasmuch as these novels were largely read
   in French or in translation from French, they were associated with
   effeminacy. However, novels slowly divested themselves of the Arthurian
   and chivalric trappings and came to centre on more ordinary or
   picaresque figures. One of the most significant figures in the rise of
   the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the
   first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first
   professional novelists of either sex in England.
   First edition of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, 1688.
   Enlarge
   First edition of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, 1688.

   Behn's first novel was Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister
   in 1684. This was an epistolary novel documenting the amours of a
   scandalous nobleman who was unfaithful to his wife with her sister
   (thus making his lover his sister-in-law rather than biological
   sister). The novel is highly romantic, sexually explicit, and
   political. Behn wrote the novel in two parts, with the second part
   showing a distinctly different style from the first. Behn also wrote a
   number of "Histories" of fictional figures, such as her The History of
   a Nun. However, her most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a
   biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved
   in Suriname.

   Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a
   dramatist. Later novels by Daniel Defoe would adopt the same narrative
   framework, although his choice of biography would be tempered by his
   experience as a journalist writing "true histories" of criminals.

   Other forms of fiction were also popular. British readers had versions
   of the stories of Reynard the Fox, as well as various indigenous folk
   tales, such as the various Dick Whittington and Tom Thumb fables. Most
   of these were in verse, but some circulated in prose. These largely
   anonymous or folk compositions circulated as chapbooks.

Subliterary genres and writers

   Along with the figures mentioned above, the Restoration period saw the
   beginnings of explicitly political writing and hack writing. Roger
   L'Estrange was a pamphleteer who became the surveyor of presses and
   licenser of the press after the Restoration. In 1663-6, L'Estrange
   published The News (which was not regular in its appearance, see
   above). When he was implicated in the Popish Plot and fled England, he
   published The Observator (1681-1687) to attack Titus Oates and the
   Puritans. L'Estrange's most important contributions to literature,
   however, came with his translations. He translated Erasmus in 1680,
   Quevedo in 1668, and, most famously and importantly, Aesop's Fables in
   1692 and 1699. This last set off a small craze for writing new fables,
   and particularly political fables.

   Also during the later part of the period, Charles Gildon and Edmund
   Curll began their work on hireling "Lives." Curll was a bookseller
   (what today would be called a publisher), and he paid authors to
   produce biographies, translations, and the like. Similarly, Gildon, who
   was an occasional friend of Restoration authors, produced biographies
   with wholesale inventions in them. This writing for pay was despised by
   the literary authors, who called it "hack" writing.

Drama

Context

   The Duke's Theatre at Dorset Gardens.
   Enlarge
   The Duke's Theatre at Dorset Gardens.

   The return of the stage-struck Charles II to power in 1660 was a major
   event in English theatre history. As soon as the previous Puritan
   regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama
   recreated itself quickly and abundantly. Two theatre companies, the
   King's and the Duke's Company, were established in London, with two
   luxurious playhouses built to designs by Christopher Wren and fitted
   with moveable scenery and thunder and lightning machines.

   Traditionally, Restoration plays have been studied by genre rather than
   chronology, more or less as if they were all contemporary, but scholars
   today insist on the rapid evolvement of drama in the period and on the
   importance of social and political factors affecting it. (Unless
   otherwise indicated, the account below is based on Hume's influential
   Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, 1976).
   The influence of theatre company competition and playhouse economics is
   also acknowledged, as is the significance of the appearance of the
   first professional actresses (see Howe).

   In the 1660s and 1670s, the London scene was vitalised by the
   competition between the two patent companies. The need to rise to the
   challenges of the other house made playwrights and managers extremely
   responsive to public taste, and theatrical fashions fluctuated almost
   week by week. The mid-1670s were a high point of both quantity and
   quality, with John Dryden's Aureng-Zebe (1675), William Wycherley's The
   Country Wife (1675) and The Plain-Dealer (1676), George Etherege's The
   Man of Mode (1676), and Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), all within a few
   seasons.

   From 1682 the production of new plays dropped sharply, affected both by
   a merger between the two companies and by the political turmoil of the
   Popish Plot (1678) and the Exclusion crisis (1682). The 1680s were
   especially lean years for comedy, the only exception being the
   remarkable career of Aphra Behn, whose achievement as the first
   professional British woman dramatist has been the subject of much
   recent study. There was a swing away from comedy to serious political
   drama, reflecting preoccupations and divisions following on the
   political crisis. The few comedies produced also tended to be political
   in focus, the whig dramatist Thomas Shadwell sparring with the tories
   John Dryden and Aphra Behn.

   In the calmer times after 1688, Londoners were again ready to be amused
   by stage performance, but the single "United Company" was not well
   prepared to offer it. No longer powered by competition, the company had
   lost momentum and been taken over by predatory investors
   ("Adventurers"), while management in the form of the autocratic
   Christopher Rich attempted to finance a tangle of "farmed" shares and
   sleeping partners by slashing actors' salaries. The upshot of this
   mismanagement was that the disgruntled actors set up their own
   cooperative company in 1695. A few years of re-invigorated two-company
   competition followed which allowed a brief second flowering of the
   drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve's Love For
   Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh's The
   Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were "softer" and more
   middle class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic
   extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. If
   "Restoration literature" is the literature that reflects and reflects
   upon the court of Charles II, Restoration drama arguably ends before
   Charles II's death, as the playhouse moved rapidly from the domain of
   courtiers to the domain of the city middle classes. On the other hand,
   Restoration drama shows altogether more fluidity and rapidity than
   other types of literature, and so, even more than in other types of
   literature, its movements should never be viewed as absolute. Each
   decade has brilliant exceptions to every rule and entirely forgettable
   confirmations of it.

Serious drama

          She-tragedy

   Genre in Restoration drama is peculiar. On the one hand, the authors
   labeled their works according to the old tags, "comedy" and "drama"
   and, especially, "history." However, these plays in reality defied the
   old categories, and from 1660 onwards, new dramatic genres arose,
   mutated, and intermixed very rapidly. In tragedy, the leading style in
   the early Restoration period was the male-dominated heroic drama,
   exemplified by John Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1670) and
   Aureng-Zebe (1675) which celebrated powerful, aggressively masculine
   heroes and their pursuit of glory both as rulers and conquerors, and as
   lovers. These plays were sometimes called by their authors histories or
   tragedies, and contemporary critics will call them after Dryden's term
   of " Heroic drama." Heroic dramas centered on the actions of men of
   decisive natures, men whose physical and (sometimes) intellectual
   qualities made them natural leaders. In one sense, this was a
   reflection of an idealized king such as Charles or Charles's courtiers
   might have imagined. However, such dashing heroes were also seen by the
   audiences as occasionally standing in for noble rebels who would
   redress injustice with the sword. The plays were, however, tragic in
   the strictest definition, even though they were not necessarily sad.

   In the 1670s and 1680s, a gradual shift occurred from heroic to
   pathetic tragedy, where the focus was on love and domestic concerns,
   even though the main characters might often be public figures. After
   the phenomenal success of Elizabeth Barry in moving the audience to
   tears in the role of Monimia in Thomas Otway's The Orphan (1680),
   "she-tragedies" (a term coined by Nicholas Rowe), which focused on the
   sufferings of an innocent and virtuous woman, became the dominant form
   of pathetic tragedy. Elizabeth Howe has argued that the most important
   explanation for the shift in taste was the emergence of tragic
   actresses whose popularity made it unavoidable for dramatists to create
   major roles for them. With the conjunction of the playwright "master of
   pathos" Thomas Otway and the great tragedienne Elizabeth Barry in The
   Orphan, the focus shifted from hero to heroine. Prominent she-tragedies
   include John Banks's Virtue Betrayed, or, Anna Bullen (1682) (about the
   execution of Anne Boleyn), Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage
   (1694), and Nicholas Rowe's The Fair Penitent (1703) and Lady Jane
   Grey, 1715.

   While she-tragedies were more comfortably tragic, in that they featured
   women who suffered for no fault of their own and featured tragic flaws
   that were emotional rather than moral or intellectual, their success
   did not mean that more overtly political tragedy was not staged. The
   Exclusion crisis brought with it a number of tragic implications in
   real politics, and therefore any treatment of, for example, the Earl of
   Essex (several versions of which were circulated and briefly acted at
   non-patent theaters) could be read as seditious. Thomas Otway's Venice
   Preserv'd of 1682 was a royalist political play that, like Dryden's
   Absalom and Achitophel, seemed to praise the king for his actions in
   the meal tub plot. Otway's play had the floating city of Venice stand
   in for the river town of London, and it had the dark senatorial
   plotters of the play stand in for the Earl of Shaftesbury. It even
   managed to figure in the Duke of Monmouth, Charles's illegitimate,
   war-hero son who was favored by many as Charles's successor over the
   Roman Catholic James. Venice Preserv'd is, in a sense, the perfect
   synthesis of the older politically royalist tragedies and histories of
   Dryden and the newer she-tragedies of feminine suffering, for, although
   the plot seems to be a political allegory, the action centers on a
   woman who cares for a man in conflict, and most of the scenes and
   dialogue concern her pitiable sufferings at his hands.

Comedy

   Restoration comedy is famous or notorious for its sexual explicitness,
   a quality encouraged by Charles II personally and by the rakish
   aristocratic ethos of his court.

   The best-known plays of the early Restoration period are the
   unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and
   George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate
   an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and
   conquest. The Earl of Rochester, real-life Restoration rake, courtier
   and poet, is flatteringly portrayed in Etherege's Man of Mode (1676) as
   a riotous, witty, intellectual, and sexually irresistible aristocrat, a
   template for posterity's idea of the glamorous Restoration rake
   (actually never a very common character in Restoration comedy).
   Wycherley's The Plain-Dealer (1676), a variation on the theme of
   Molière's Le misanthrope, was highly regarded for its uncompromising
   satire and earned Wycherley the appellation "Plain Dealer" Wycherley or
   "Manly" Wycherley, after the play's main character Manly. The single
   play that does most to support the charge of obscenity levelled then
   and now at Restoration comedy is probably Wycherley's The Country Wife
   (1675).

   During the second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer"
   comedies of William Congreve and John Vanbrugh reflected mutating
   cultural perceptions and great social change. The playwrights of the
   1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong
   middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving
   the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of
   marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the
   older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells. In
   Congreve's plays, the give-and-take setpieces of couples still testing
   their attraction for each other have mutated into witty prenuptial
   debates on the eve of marriage, as in the famous "Proviso" scene in The
   Way of the World (1700).

   Restoration drama had a solidly bad reputation for three centuries. The
   "incongruous" mixing of comedy and tragedy beloved by Restoration
   audiences was execrated on all hands. The Victorians denounced the
   comedy as too indecent for the stage ( Thomas Macaulay), and the
   standard reference work of the early 20th century, The Cambridge
   History of English and American Literature, dismissed the tragedy as
   being of "a level of dulness and lubricity never surpassed before or
   since". Today, the Restoration total theatre experience is again
   valued, both by post-modern literary critics and on the stage. The
   comedies of Aphra Behn in particular, long condemned as especially
   offensive in coming from a woman's pen, have become academic and
   repertory favorites.
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