Restoration Drama

2013 | Essays

As well as discussing familiar authors such as William Wycherley, Aphra Behn and William Congreve, this book also considers several neglected dramatists whose plays defy easy classification. Together these writers embraced subjects as diverse as political authority, colonialism, social identity, sexual transgression and the nature of language. In doing so they created a new kind of theatre.
Chronology
Beginnings
Sources
Libertines and 'Acceptable Violence'
William Wycherley and the Dance of Cuckolds
The Cruel Fathers: Restoration Tragedy
Aphra Behn and the Masculine Part
William Congreve and the Melancholic Lunatics
'This Adultery of the Mind': The Second Generation
Sean Elliott gained his PhD from Goldsmiths College. He teaches at Birkbeck, University of London and for the Open University. His poetry collection, Waterhouse and the Tempest, was published in 2009. He is currently writing a study of Richard Brinsley Sheridan for Greenwich Exchange and working on his second book of poems.

Sean Elliott (Author)