'Restoration Comedy' and Its Audiences, 1660-1776

Abstract

The nature of the audience in 'Restoration' theatres has been much disputed. Scholars hostile to risque comedy have tended to follow Macaulay in supposing that debauched courtiers feasted upon fictionalized accounts of their own misdeeds. Believers in a genteel 'comedy of manners' have propagated the myth of a courtly coterie audience. Recent scholarship has demolished both suppositions and left us new hypotheses in their place. John Harrington Smith points to a 'change' in comedy in the I68os and I69os which he attributes to the influence of 'the Ladies' in opposition to 'the Gallants' who had the ascendance in the I67os. John Loftis has traced the growth of bourgeois and mercantilist ideology in the drama from 1690 to I737 as a gradual response to changes in audience composition. Both of these studies are, broadly speaking, 'correct', and yet some knotty problems still await our attention. How uniform were the tastes or beliefs of the 'original' Restoration audience at any given time between I66O and I700 ? How significantly did audience outlook shift between 1675 and 1695, or, in other words, between the heyday of Wycherley and that of Congreve ? What happened in the critical years around I700 when the shift to 'sentimental' comedy allegedly took place? If the new bourgeois audience rejected all the 'Restoration stereotypes' after 1700, why did the work not only of Congreve but of his contemporaries and predecessors remain enormously popular for more than half a century? These are large and complicated subjects, and we cannot pretend to offer more than tentative answers. We hope, however, to call some common assumptions into doubt and to suggest that the relationship between 'Restoration comedy' and its changing audience is more complicated than critics have wanted to admit. For a long time people made assumptions about the 'Restoration audience' based on hostile readings of the bawdier comedies. Modern research has demolished those assumptions. But how did the heterogeneous audience we now know to have filled the theatres view the comedies served up for their delectation or instruction ? And contrariwise, our view of the audience has changed: what does our new sense of the audience imply about the plays ?