What the Restoration Changed

The idea

The Restoration began in sixteen sixty, when Charles the Second returned and reopened the theatres after eighteen years, and it changed English writing in three ways. First, the stage returned with something new: women acted for the first time, and comedy turned to the manners of fashionable London. The comedy of manners satirized social codes through wit, with the rake and the fop as its stock figures; Wycherley's Country Wife was the bawdiest play yet seen, Congreve's Way of the World set Mirabell and Millamant's wit against money and a disapproving aunt, and Jeremy Collier attacked the whole form as immoral in sixteen ninety-eight. Second, poetry turned to public argument in the closed heroic couplet. Dryden, the first Poet Laureate and the dominant writer of the age, mocked a dull poet in "Mac Flecknoe," allegorized the Exclusion Crisis in Absalom and Achitophel, and argued that satire's end is the correction of vice. Rochester, a courtier and rake, satirized reason itself. Third, new voices entered print. Aphra Behn wrote for a living, comedies such as The Rover and the prose history Oroonoko, about an enslaved African prince; Katherine Philips wrote on friendship as Orinda; Bunyan, a nonconformist jailed for preaching, wrote The Pilgrim's Progress; and Pepys kept a private shorthand diary of the Plague and the Fire. To answer a question on the age, read for the wit and ask what it exposes, sort the work by genre, and check whether a clue points to satire, comedy or prose.