Hello.

Welcome to the next lecture.

This is lecture is on the Restoration period and Restoration Comedy.

Charles II came to power in 1660 and he ruled until sixteen eighty five.

He was brought up in the French and Scottish courts.

He was Scottish.

The family was Scottish. And he brought a lot of French artists and writers, etc. into England.

In Charles II's time

there were lots of natural calamities, like the plague broke out again,

there was a great fire of London,

There was a battle with the Dutch, and Charles was secretly Catholic. On his deathbed he even
converted

to Catholicism. Charles did not have legitimate heirs and the apparent heir was his brother
James,

who was also pro-Catholic. This led it to the Exclusion Crisis. Two political parties had formed
in the Restoration period --

They were the Whigs and the Tories. The Tories were Conservatives, the Whigs were liberals.
The Tories

wanted royal blood to sit on the throne.

They supported the brother of Charles but the Whigs, the Liberals, supported the eldest
illegitimate son

of Charles, James Scott Duke of Monmouth.

This is called the Exclusion Crisis.

The Whigs lost.

The Tories won.

Thus the brother James came to power as James II.

That was in 1685. He ruled for three years, during which time a son was born to him.

He reintroduced Catholicism. Even the Tories now did not want James to continue.

They went and invited James's daughter Mary and her husband William from Orange to come
and rule England.

James did not wait to fight.

He just escaped to Scotland.

This is called the Glorious Revolution.

As I already told you, during the Restoration period,

there was the French influence.

There was also the influence of the Baroque style in art.

The Baroque was the high point of the Renaissance, and the heightened form of Baroque was
called Rococo

style in art, which is an elaborate aristocratic style.

During this time

aristocratic culture predominated. In poetry

there was libertine verse, immoral verse, aristocratic verse. In prose

there was philosophical prose. Charles was not a very learned man.

He support that simple. plain writing.

Charles also supported science. The Royal Society was formed in 1662.

The theatres were reopened after the Puritan rule in 1660.

At this time

Restoration theatre was indoor theatre, with the picture frame stage. In front of the stage, there is
like

a picture frame.

You get the impression that you are looking inside a house, into a room. On such a stage,
very intimate scenes, bedroom scenes, etc. are possible. War and outdoor events are not possible.

The Restoration theatre also had moving scenery and artificial lighting.

Women actresses performed on stage for the first time.

There was also a lot of immorality and spectacle. Among the Restoration writers, or comedy
writers,

the oldest was William Wycherley. He was a libertine and aristocrat who led a very liberal life.

His first play was Love in a Wood or St. James's Park, followed by The Country Wife, which is a
very indecent

immoral play. And following which came his most important play The Plain Dealer. The Plain
Dealer

by Wycherley had the protagonist Manly, which gave Wycherley the name Manley Wycherley.
The next

important writer is William Congreve. William Congreve's important plays are The Double
Dealer...

[The Plain Dealer is by Wycherley; The Double Dealer is by Congreve.] Love for Love, The
Way of the World...

The Way of the World came in 1700. Two years before that Wycherley had been attacked by

Jeremy Collier. Jeremy Collier had attacked

Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh and all the other restoration comedy writers

in 1698, in the book A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.

After that Wycherley wrote The Way of the World, which is a very chaste play compared to his
other plays.

The protagonists of The Way of the World are Millamant (the heroine is Millamant, very
virtuous smart

girl) and Mirabel (the male protagonist). The next important writer is George Etherege. He was a
very

famous man at that time. The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub,

his first major play. She Would if She Could is also another important play by Etherege.
Next, we have Farquhar. Farquhar is the only Restoration comedy writer who did not write about
London.

He wrote about the suburban town called Shrewsbury. Farquhar is the author of The Recruiting
Officer.

Vanbrugh is the author of The Relapse. I told you Vanbrugh was also attacked by Jeremy
Collier.

Vanbrugh's The Relapse was a reply to another writer, Colley Cibber, who wrote Love's Last
Shift. In

Love's Last Shift, a rake is reformed by his wife. A rake is a libertine man. And in Vanbrugh's
The Relapse, a rake

who is reformed by his wife is relapsing into his old womanizing ways. A rake cannot be
reformed -- that is

what Vanbrugh is trying to show. There were three important women playwrights during this
time -- one

of them wrote Restoration comedies. They were Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood and Delarivier
Manly. They were friends,

and they were called the Fair Triumvirate.

Aphra Behn has written plays as well as novels. Her famous novel is Oroonoko, or The Royal
Slave. She lived

in Surinam as a spy for some time, and this novel is partly set in Surinam. It's the story of an
African

prince who is sold as a slave, and he kills his own sweetheart, the African girl Imoinda, to
prevent her

from torture by the slave traders. Ultimately he is tortured to death -- he is cut to pieces.

So that's about the Restoration period and Restoration comedy. Please do your own reading and
do the tests.

Thank you very much.