Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

No companion to Restoration drama of thirty years ago would have given a separate chapter to Durfey and Shadwell. The mud spattered on their names by such figures as Dryden, Swift, Pope and Johnson effectively killed interest in their plays for modern scholars, even though their works had remained popular for much of the eighteenth century (Pope and Swift were even nominally friends of Durfey when they mocked his writing). Indeed, other than Congreve, Dryden, Etherege, Farquhar, Vanbrugh and Wycherley among comic playwrights, and Dryden, Otway (and maybe Lee) among tragic playwrights, most dramatists of the Restoration received little attention in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, even among specialists of Restoration and eighteenth-century English literature. ‘Comedy of manners’ dominated critical discussion of comedy, and ‘heroic’ and ‘pathetic’ were the common designations for serious plays. Neither Shadwell's nor Durfey's plays fit comfortably in any of these categories. A shift in scholarly emphasis slowly brought attention to playwrights other than those usually anthologized. The publication of The London Stage, 1660–1800 made available the performance records for the entire period and made clear how complicated the picture of theatrical movements actually was. Robert Hume, in his seminal work The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (1976), ... log in or subscribe to read full text