Restoration Comedy is popularly known as the Comedy of Manners since it reflects the fashionable manners of the day. The most common adjectives used to describe Restoration comedy are witty, bawdy, cynical, amoral and immoral. Its main aim was to entertain the audience rather than to reform.
Restoration Comedy as Immoral and the Collier Controversy
Before the Restoration it was quite common to assert that any form of art must be the handmaiden of morality. However the aim of Restoration Comedy seems to not only disregard but also to ridicule the morals of the Puritans in its plots full of sexual intrigue and in its castigating the institution of marriage.
Restoration playwrights were often under attack for the frivolity, blasphemy and immorality of their comedies. In 1698 Jeremy Collier attacked Restoration Comedy in his essay “A Short View on the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage”. In his essay, Collier concludes that these immoral and profane plays portray vulgarities and indecencies of language; indecencies of plot line; ridicule religion; and the authorial intention is to encourage immorality because the lewd character always succeeds. He concludes that Restoration Comedy is an insidious attack on the institution of marriage.
Nevertheless, Collier’s attacks were challenged by the playwrights who defended their works as serious social criticisms and mirrors of society. Vanbrugh insisted that his plays are “a discouragement of vice and folly”. His reply invokes Aristotle’s conception of mimesis where he states that art addresses and purges the passions: “The glass is a stage for the world to view itself in”. Similarly, Congreve replied to Collier’s attack by stating that “Comedy (says Aristotle) is an imitation of the worst sort of people ... to be laugh’d out of their vices in comedy; the business of comedy is to delight as well as to instruct”.
Contemporary Criticism on Restoration Comedy
The controversy on the morality or immorality of Restoration Comedy remained in the twentieth century. Some critics like John Wain described Restoration Comedy not only as immoral but as “the fever-chart of a sick society”, whereas L. C. Knights pronounced the comedies of the Restoration period as bawdy and boring.
On the other side of the spectrum critics such as John Palmer viewed Restoration Comedy as a mirror to seventeenth century society that provides historical value, while Kathleen Lynch in The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy sees the comedy of manners as not merely a manifestation of manners but also a satire of the manners, manifesting social and moral values.
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