Four Restoration Libertine Plays

Thomas Shadwell, The Libertine * George Etherege, The Man of Mode * Thomas Durfey, A Fond Husband * Thomas Otway, Friendship in Fashion These four plays in the Oxford English Drama series capture the range of responses to the fashionable and daring libertine movement in the second half of the seventeenth century. A Fond Husband and Friendship in Fashion are lesser-known comic gems of the Restoration stage; The Man of Mode is Etherege's masterpiece, and The Libertine is Shadwell's experimental and dark version of the Don Juan story. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. There is a critical introduction, wide-ranging annotation, and an informative bibliography which together illuminate the plays' cultural context and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike. 'The series should shape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University

Thomas Shadwell, The Libertine * George Etherege, The Man of Mode * Thomas Durfey, A Fond Husband * Thomas Otway, Friendship in Fashion These four plays in the Oxford English Drama series capture the range of responses to the fashionable and daring libertine movement in the second half of the seventeenth century. A Fond Husband and Friendship in Fashion are lesser-known comic gems of the Restoration stage; The Man of Mode is Etherege's masterpiece, and The Libertine is Shadwell's experimental and dark version of the Don Juan story. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. There is a critical introduction, wide-ranging annotation, and an informative bibliography which together illuminate the plays' cultural context and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike. 'The series should shape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University

In 1660 England celebrated the Restoration of the Stuarts, acclaiming the divine authority of the monarchy whose mortal weakness had been illustrated all too well. For the country that could kill its king, what could truly now be seen as sacred and where could true authority be found? A sense of vertiginous moral freedom lent the festivities a desperate edge. Cynical, stylish and seductive, the figure of the libertine embodied this destabilising force. No propriety was safe from his elegant derision, no chastity proof against his inveigling ways. In a series of outrageously irreverent comedies and bitter, disillusioned tragedies, he strode the Restoration stage. This anthology brings together Dryden¿s wittily risqué comedy Marriage A-la-Mode, and his roaring farce The Kind Keeper; Shadwell¿s outrageous version of the Don Juan legend, The Libertine; Otway¿s bitter tragedy, The Orphan; Southerne¿s dark satire, The Wives¿ Excuse; and Aphra Behn¿s feisty ripostes to her male contemporaries, The Rover, Parts I and II.

Marriage and its discontents lie at the heart of Restoration comedy. In all four of the great plays gathered here, a married woman confronts her would-be seducer. Each dramatist, however, totally reinterprets the situation. Thomas Otway's The Soldier's Fortune converts adultery into political revenge. Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleves offers a potent and perplexing portrait of a libertine in action at the sixteenth-century French court. John Dryden's Amphitryon, set in ancient Thebes, retells the story in which Jupiter lures the virtuous Alcmena into cuckolding her husband by a stratagem that throws into doubt the very nature of human identity. Thomas Southerne's The Wives' Excuse reinvents, for the new circumstances of the 1690s, the familiar Restoration plot of a wife spurred towards infidelity by her partner's failings. All of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation.

An accessible and engaging introduction to Restoration drama, this book looks at the texts, performances, playhouses and people of seventeenth-century theatre.

Deborah C. Payne explores how the duopoly of 1660 impacted company practices, stagecraft, the box office, and actors and writers.

Introduction: The long-running Restoration -- Corpsing Lothario -- Debating Dorimant -- Stuarts without end -- Libertines and liberalism.

Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.