THE best general introduction to the staging and production of Restoration plays is found in the preface to Part 1 of The London Stage, ed. William Van Lennep (Carbondale, Ill., 1965). Peter Holland’s The Ornament of Action (Cambridge, 1979) discusses the staging of the drama and advances some intriguing hypotheses about the use of performance space in the Restoration playhouse. Jocelyn Powell, in Restoration Theatre Production (London, 1984), looks more closely at the technical features of the Restoration playhouse and scenic design. J. L. Styan’s Restoration Comedy in Performance (Cambridge, 1986), uses contemporary materials, such as conduct books and illustrations, to recreate staging conditions. For information about performers and personnel, readers are advised to consult Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans’s A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (16 vols.; Carbondale, Ill., 1973–93). Pierre Danchin’s The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration, 1660–1700 (7 vols.; Nancy, 1981–8) gathers together all of the known prologues and epilogues in the period, as well as providing a good overview of this theatrical convention.
A number of useful collections of essays on Restoration drama have been published, especially in the last few years: John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (eds.), Restoration Theatre (London, 1965); John Loftis (ed.), Restoration Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1966); Earl Miner (ed.), Restoration Dramatists: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966); Robert D. Hume (ed.), The London Theatre World, 1660–1800 (Carbondale, Ill., 1980); Richard W. Bevis (ed.), English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660–1789 (London, 1988); J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne (eds.), Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theatre (Athens, Ga., 1995); Katherine M. Quinsey (ed.), Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama (Lexington, Ky., 1996); Deborah Payne Fisk (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (Cambridge, 2000); Susan J. Owen (ed.), A Companion to Restoration Drama (Oxford, 2001).
Robert D. Hume’s The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976) remains the best general overview of dramatic genre in the period. His sections on the various types of comedy are helpful, and he includes brief considerations of the four plays in this volume. Laura Brown’s English Dramatic Form, 1660–1760: An Essay in Generic History (New Haven, 1981), considers genre change from a Marxist perspective. Eric Rothstein and Frances M. Kavenik, The Designs of Carolean Comedy (Carbondale, Ill., 1988), locates generic change in audience taste and the box office. Brian Corman’s Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy, 1660–1710 (Toronto, 1993) follows closely on the heels of Hume’s formalist approach.
Most studies of Restoration comedy focus on the canonical dramatists; invariably, they include a discussion of Sir George Etherege’s The Man of Mode, but they tend to overlook the other plays in this volume. The more influential of these canonical studies include Thomas H. Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton, 1952); Norman Holland, The First Modern Comedies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Virginia Ogden Birdsall, Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage (Bloomington, Ind., 1970); Robert Markley, Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford, 1988); and Pat Gill, Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners (Athens, Ga., 1994). J. Douglas Canfield’s Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy (Lexington, Ky., 1997) is one of the few studies to consider Shadwell, Durfey, and Otway, as well as Etherege.
Nonetheless, Shadwell has begun to attract more critical attention. Christopher J. Wheatley wrote the first full-length monograph, Without God or Reason (Lewisburg, Pa., 1993), which includes a very good discussion of The Libertine. Following soon after in 1996 was a special issue of the journal Restoration devoted solely to Shadwell’s dramatic works. Barbara A. Simerka considers The Libertine at length in her recent monograph, Eros and Atheism: Providential Ideology in the Don Juan Plays of Tirso de Molina and Thomas Shadwell (Lewisburg, Pa., 2000). J. M. Armistead’s Four Restoration Playwrights: A Reference Guide to Thomas Shadwell, Aphra Behn, Nathaniel Lee, and Thomas Otway (Boston, 1984) provides readers with a useful bibliography of writings by and about Shadwell; it also covers Otway.
As might be expected, Etherege, because of his canonical status, has been the subject of several individual studies. David D. Mann published a major bibliography, Sir George Etherege: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1981); he has also produced the eminently useful A Concordance to the Plays and Poems of Sir George Etherege (Westport, Conn., 1985). Long ago Bonamy Dobrée included a biographical sketch of Etherege in his Essays in Biography, 1680–1726 (London, 1925); interestingly, no one to date has written a critical biography of this compelling figure. Frederick Bracher compiled Etherege’s amusing letters in a nicely annotated edition, Letters of Sir George Etherege (Berkeley, 1973). Dale Underwood’s Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners (New Haven, 1957) remains the single best intellectual study of Etherege’s plays, while Arthur R. Huseboe’s Sir George Etherege (Boston, 1987) provides readers with a general overview. Numerous articles and individual book chapters have been devoted to The Man of Mode, and there is little sign of cessation in the near future.
Until recently, Durfey was accorded little more than a passing glance in large thematic or generic treatments of Restoration comedy (see above). J. Douglas Canfield and Christopher Wheatley paved the way for serious consideration of this very good dramatist. Canfield discusses several of Durfey’s comedies in Tricksters and Estates, while Wheatley takes up A Fond Husband in an important article, ‘Thomas Durfey’s A Fond Husband, Sex Comedies of the 1670s and Early 1680s, and the Comic Sublime’, SP 90 (1993), 371-90. More recently, two book-length studies have appeared: Garry Sherbert’s Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne (New York, 1996) and John McVeagh’s Thomas Durfey and Restoration Drama: The Work of a Forgotten Writer (Aldershot, 2000).
Otway’s comedies have received far less attention than his tragedies; to date, most scholarship continues to focus on Venice Preserv’d to the exclusion of his other, very good plays. Fortunately, Jessica Munns devotes several incisive pages to Friendship in Fashion in Restoration Politics and Drama: The Plays of Thomas Otway, 1675–1683 (Newark, Del., 1995), as does Harold Weber in The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison, 1986). Robert D. Hume first drew attention to the play in The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Roswell Ham sketched Otway’s life in Otway and Lee: Biography from a Baroque Age (New Haven, 1931). That biography has been superseded by J. Douglas Canfield’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, lxxx: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Dramatists, ed. Paula Backscheider (Detroit, 1989).