Restoration literature
Restoration literature is the English literature written during the historical period commonly referred to as the English Restoration (1660-1688), which corresponds to the last years of Stuart reign in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogenous styles of literature that centre on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that includes extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden and John Dennis. The period witnessed news becoming a commodity, the essay developing into a periodical art form, and the beginnings of textual criticism.
The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention, and they differ markedly from
Historical context
During the
The last years of the Interregnum were turbulent, as were the last years of the Restoration period, and those who did not go into exile were called upon to change their religious beliefs more than once. With each religious preference came a different sort of literature, both in prose and poetry (the theatres were closed during the Interregnum). When Cromwell died and his son,
During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of
Initial reaction
When Charles II became king in 1660, the sense of novelty in literature was tempered by a sense of suddenly participating in European literature in a way that England had not before. One of Charles's first moves was to reopen the theatres and to grant
Charles II was a man who prided himself on his
Authors moved in two directions in reaction to Charles's return. On the one hand, there was an attempt at recovering the English literature of the Jacobean period, as if there had been no disruption; but, on the other, there was a powerful sense of novelty, and authors approached Gallic models of literature and elevated the literature of wit (particularly satire and parody). The novelty would show in the literature of sceptical inquiry, and the Gallicism would show in the introduction of Neoclassicism into English writing and criticism.
Top-down history
The Restoration is an unusual historical period, as its literature is bounded by a specific political event: the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. It is unusual in another way, as well, for it is a time when the influence of that king's presence and personality permeated literary society to such an extent that, almost uniquely, literature reflects the court. The adversaries of the restoration, the Puritans and democrats and republicans, similarly respond to the peculiarities of the king and the king's personality. Therefore, a top-down view of the literary history of the Restoration has more validity than that of most literary epochs. "The Restoration" as a critical concept covers the duration of the effect of Charles and Charles's manner. This effect extended beyond his death, in some instances, and not as long as his life, in others.
Poetry
The Restoration was an age of poetry. Not only was poetry the most popular form of literature, but it was also the most significant form of literature, as poems affected political events and immediately reflected the times. It was, to its own people, an age dominated only by the king, and not by any single genius. Throughout the period, the lyric, ariel, historical, and epic poem was being developed.
The English epic
Even without the introduction of Neo-classical criticism, English poets were aware that they had no national
Sir William Davenant was the first Restoration poet to attempt an epic. His unfinished Gondibert was of epic length, and it was admired by Hobbes.[4] However, it also used the ballad form, and other poets, as well as critics, were very quick to condemn this rhyme scheme as unflattering and unheroic (Dryden Epic). The prefaces to Gondibert show the struggle for a formal epic structure, as well as how the early Restoration saw themselves in relation to Classical literature.
Although today he is studied separately from the Restoration period, John Milton's Paradise Lost was published during that time. Milton no less than Davenant wished to write the English epic, and chose blank verse as his form. Milton rejected the cause of English exceptionalism: his Paradise Lost seeks to tell the story of all mankind, and his pride is in Christianity rather than Englishness.
Significantly, Milton began with an attempt at writing an epic on King Arthur, for that was the matter of English national founding. While Milton rejected that subject, in the end, others made the attempt. Richard Blackmore wrote both a Prince Arthur and King Arthur. Both attempts were long, soporific, and failed both critically and popularly. Indeed, the poetry was so slow that the author became known as "Never-ending Blackmore" (see Alexander Pope's lambasting of Blackmore in The Dunciad).
The Restoration period ended without an English epic.
Poetry, verse, and odes
Formally, the Restoration period had a preferred rhyme scheme.
Although Dryden's reputation is greater today, contemporaries saw the 1670s and 1680s as the age of courtier poets in general, and Edmund Waller was as praised as any. Dryden, Rochester, Buckingham, and Dorset dominated verse, and all were attached to the court of Charles. Aphra Behn, Matthew Prior, and Robert Gould, by contrast, were outsiders who were profoundly royalist. The court poets follow no one particular style, except that they all show sexual awareness, a willingness to satirise, and a dependence upon wit to dominate their opponents. Each of these poets wrote for the stage as well as the page. Of these, Behn, Dryden, Rochester, and Gould deserve some separate mention.
Dryden was prolific; and he was often accused of plagiarism. Both before and after his Laureateship, he wrote public odes. He attempted the Jacobean pastoral along the lines of
Buckingham wrote some court poetry, but he, like Dorset, was a patron of poetry more than a poet. Rochester, meanwhile, was a prolix and outrageous poet. Rochester's poetry is almost always sexually frank and is frequently political. Inasmuch as the Restoration came after the Interregnum, the very sexual explicitness of Rochester's verse was a political statement and a thumb in the eye of Puritans. His poetry often assumes a lyric pose, as he pretends to write in sadness over his own impotence ("The Disabled Debauchee") or sexual conquests, but most of Rochester's poetry is a parody of an existing, Classically authorised form. He has a mock
If Behn is a curious exception to the rule of noble verse,
Translations and controversialists
The largest and most important form of incunabula of the era was satire. There were great dangers in being associated with satire and its publication was generally done anonymously. To begin with,
Prose genres
Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion.
Philosophical writing
The Restoration saw the publication of a number of significant pieces of political and philosophical writing that had been spurred by the actions of the Interregnum. Additionally, the court's adoption of Neo-classicism and empirical science led to a receptiveness toward significant philosophical works.
Thomas Sprat wrote his History of the Royal Society in 1667 and set forth, in a single document, the goals of empirical science ever after. He expressed grave suspicions of adjectives, nebulous terminology, and all language that might be subjective. He praised a spare, clean, and precise vocabulary for science and explanations that are as comprehensible as possible. In Sprat's account, the Royal Society explicitly rejected anything that seemed like scholasticism. For Sprat, as for a number of the founders of the Royal Society, science was Protestant: its reasons and explanations had to be comprehensible to all. There would be no priests in science, and anyone could reproduce the experiments and hear their lessons. Similarly, he emphasised the need for conciseness in description, as well as reproducibility of experiments.
The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his Two Treatises of Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasises the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored; only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying.
Religious writing
The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as
Fox, and William Penn, made public vows of pacifism and preached a new theology of peace and love. Other Puritans contented themselves with being able to meet freely and act on local parishes. They distanced themselves from the harshest sides of their religion that had led to the abuses of Cromwell's reign. Two religious authors stand out beyond the others in this time: John Bunyan and Izaak Walton.
Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser.
Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler is similarly introspective. Ostensibly, his book is a guide to fishing, but readers treasured its contents for their descriptions of nature and serenity. There are few analogues to this prose work. On the surface, it appears to be in the tradition of other guide books (several of which appeared in the Restoration, including Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester, which is one of the earliest attempts at settling the rules of card games), but, like Pilgrim's Progress, its main business is guiding the individual.
More court-oriented religious prose included sermon collections and a great literature of debate over the
Journalism
During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.
The early efforts at news sheets and periodicals were spotty.
Sporadic essays combined with news had been published throughout the Restoration period, but The Athenian Mercury was the first regularly published periodical in England.
The Athenian Mercury set the stage for the later
Fiction
Although it is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso engendered prose narratives of love, peril, and revenge, and Gauthier de Costes, seigneur de la Calprenède's novels were quite popular during the Interregnum and beyond.
The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading "novels" as a vice. Inasmuch as these novels were largely read in French or in translation from French, they were associated with effeminacy. However, novels slowly divested themselves of the
Behn's first novel was Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister in 1684. This was an epistolary novel documenting the amours of a scandalous nobleman who was unfaithful to his wife with her sister (thus making his lover his sister-in-law rather than biological sister). The novel is highly romantic, sexually explicit, and political. Behn wrote the novel in two parts, with the second part showing a distinctly different style from the first. Behn also wrote several "Histories" of fictional figures, such as her The History of a Nun. As the genre of "novel" did not exist, these histories were prose fictions based on biography. However, her most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a fictional biography, published as a "true history", of an African king who had been enslaved in Suriname, a colony Behn herself had visited.
Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist. Later novels by Daniel Defoe would adopt the same narrative framework, although his choice of biography would be tempered by his experience as a journalist writing "true histories" of criminals.
Other forms of fiction were also popular. Available to readers were versions of the stories of .
Subliterary genres and writers
Along with the figures mentioned above, the Restoration period saw the beginnings of explicitly political writing and hack writing. Roger L'Estrange was a pamphleteer who became the surveyor of presses and licenser of the press after the Restoration. In 1663–6, L'Estrange published The News (which was not regular in its appearance, see above). When he was implicated in the Popish Plot and fled England, he published The Observator (1681–1687) to attack Titus Oates and the Puritans. L'Estrange's most important contributions to literature, however, came with his translations. He translated Erasmus in 1680, Quevedo in 1668, and, most famously and importantly, Aesop's Fables in 1692 and 1699. This last set off a small craze for writing new fables, and particularly political fables.
Also during the later part of the period, Charles Gildon and Edmund Curll began their work on hireling "Lives." Curll was a bookseller (what today would be called a publisher), and he paid authors to produce biographies, translations, and the like. Similarly, Gildon, who was an occasional friend of Restoration authors, produced biographies with wholesale inventions in them. This writing for pay was despised by the literary authors, who called it "hack" writing.
Theatre
Context
The return of the stage-struck Charles II to power in 1660 was a major event in English theatre history. As soon as the previous Puritan regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. Two theatre companies, the King's and the Duke's Company, were established in London, with two luxurious playhouses built to designs by
Traditionally, Restoration plays have been studied by genre rather than chronology, more or less as if they were all contemporary, but scholars today insist on the rapid evolvement of drama in the period and on the importance of social and political factors affecting it. (Unless otherwise indicated, the account below is based on Hume's influential Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, 1976.) The influence of theatre company competition and playhouse economics is also acknowledged, as is the significance of the appearance of the first professional actresses (see Howe).
In the 1660s and 1670s, the London scene was vitalised by the competition between the two patent companies. The need to rise to the challenges of the other house made playwrights and managers extremely responsive to public taste, and theatrical fashions fluctuated almost week by week. The mid-1670s were a high point of both quantity and quality, with John Dryden's Aureng-zebe (1675), William Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676), George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), and Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), all within a few seasons.
From 1682 the production of new plays dropped sharply, affected both by a merger between the two companies and by the political turmoil of the
.In the calmer times after 1688, Londoners were again ready to be amused by stage performance, but the single "United Company" was not well prepared to offer it. No longer powered by competition, the company had lost momentum and been taken over by predatory investors ("Adventurers"), while management in the form of the autocratic
Drama
Genre in Restoration drama is peculiar. Authors labelled their works according to the old tags, "comedy" and "drama" and, especially, "history", but these plays defied the old categories. From 1660 onwards, new dramatic genres arose, mutated, and intermixed very rapidly. In tragedy, the leading style in the early Restoration period was the male-dominated
In the 1670s and 1680s, a gradual shift occurred from heroic to
While she-tragedies were more comfortably tragic, in that they showed women who suffered for no fault of their own and featured
Comedy
Restoration comedy is notorious for its
During the second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer" comedies of
Restoration drama had a bad reputation for three centuries. The "incongruous" mixing of comedy and tragedy beloved by Restoration audiences was decried. The Victorians denounced the comedy as too indecent for the stage,[12] and the standard reference work of the early 20th century, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, dismissed the tragedy as being of "a level of dulness and lubricity never surpassed before or since".[13] Today, the Restoration total theatre experience is again valued, both by postmodern literary critics and on the stage.
Spectacular
The Restoration spectacular, or elaborately staged machine play, hit the
See also
- 1660 in literature to 1689 in literature
- 1660 in poetry to 1689 in poetry
- 17th century in literature
- 17th century in poetry
Notes
- ^ "Bramhall, John" in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2006). Ed. E. A. Livingstone. Oxford Reference Online (subscription required), Oxford University Press. Retrieved on February 27, 2007.
- ^ Schelling, Felix E. "The Age of Dryden: The Restoration Drama: The King’s and the Duke of York’s Companies “Created” after it" in Ward and Trent, et al. Retrieved on February 27, 2007.
- ISBN 0-8369-1326-4, pp. 61–64.
- ^ Thompson, A. Hamilton. "Cavalier and Puritan: Writers of the Couplet: Sir William D’Avenant; Gondibert" in Ward and Trent, et al. Retrieved on February 27, 2007.
- ^ Todd p. 16.
- ^ Willmore may have also been based on Behn's lover John Hoyle. "Behn, Mrs Afra" in The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2000). Ed. Margaret Drabble. Oxford Reference Online (subscription required), Oxford University Press. Retrieved on February 27, 2007.
- ^ See online text at UVA
- ^ "Behn, Aphra" in Encyclopædia Britannica (2007). Encyclopædia Britannica Online (subscription required). Retrieved on February 27, 2007.
- London Gazette, History. Retrieved on 2008-01-07
- ^ Hume, Robert D. (1976), The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 233—238.
- ^ Milhous details two separate, but connected events: the capitalist machinations that gutted the company (pp. 37–43), and the unique, startling reaction of the actors, who fought back by setting up their own cooperative and revitalizing London theatre life (pp. 51–68).
- Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote a scathing critique of Restoration plays, noting that they "ought not to be reprinted". Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1841). "Review of Leigh Hunt, ed. The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar" in Project Gutenberg's Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 2. Retrieved on 27 February 2007.
- ^ Bartholomew, A. T. and Peterhouse, M. A. "The Age of Dryden: The Restoration Drama: Public Interest in Acting" in Ward and Trent, et al. Retrieved on February 27, 2007.
References
- Bayer, Gerd (2016). Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction. Manchester UP.
- Dryden, John (originally published in 1667). An Account of the Ensuing Poem, prefixed to Annus Mirabilis, from Project Gutenberg. Prepared from The Poetical Works of John Dryden (1855), in Library Edition of the British Poets edited George Gilfillan, vol. 1. Retrieved 18 June 2005.
- Dryden, John (originally published in 1670). Of Heroic Plays, an Essay (The preface to The Conquest of Granada), in The Works of John Dryden, Volume 04 (of 18) from Project Gutenberg. Prepared from Walter Scott's edition. Retrieved 18 June 2005.
- Dryden, John. Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry, from Project Gutenberg, prepared from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition. This volume contains "A Discourse on the Original and Progress of Satire", prefixed to The Satires of Juvenal, Translated (1692) and "A Discourse on Epic Poetry", prefixed to the translation of Virgil's Aeneid (1697). Retrieved 18 June 2005.
- Holman, C. Hugh and Harmon, William (eds.) (1986). A Handbook to Literature. New York: Macmillan Publishing.
- Howe, Elizabeth (1992). The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Hume, Robert D. (1976). The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Hunt, Leigh (ed.) (1840). The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar.
- Miller, H. K., G. S. Rousseau and Eric Rothstein, The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). ISBN 0-19-811697-7
- Milhous, Judith (1979). Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Porter, Roy (2000). The Creation of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-32268-8
- Roots, Ivan (1966). The Great Rebellion 1642–1660. London: Sutton & Sutton.
- Rosen, Stanley (1989). The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity. Yale UP.
- Sloane, Eugene H. Robert Gould: seventeenth century satirist. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania Press, 1940.
- Tillotson, Geoffrey and Fussell, Paul (eds.) (1969). Eighteenth-Century English Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich.
- Todd, Janet (2000). The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. London: Pandora Press.
- Ward, A. W, & Trent, W. P. et al. (1907–21). The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Retrieved 11 June 2005.