Preface

Why Restoration Plays and Players? This book might have been called Restoration Drama, in reference to the body of plays written between 1660 and 1714; or Restoration Theatre, the performance practices that animated them, or occasionally failed to. Instead, Restoration Plays and Players treats reading and performance (institutionally, ‘literature’ and ‘theatre’) as mutually fruitful means of approaching late seventeenth-century drama, recognizing that Restoration people themselves experienced drama in print as well as in the theatre. The title harbours a further distinction. Restoration is nothing if not political. For the past twenty years studies of the period’s plays have devoted a lot of space to the collective experience of shifting ideologies or factional politics. Players signals a counterbalancing curiosity about the theatre people who were agents or victims of that experience. Actors, writers, managers and even critics variously innovated, succumbed, resisted or simply carried on as the world changed around them.

So to the subtitle: An Introduction. The contexts for Restoration plays are manifold and complex, whether in original performance, reading or recent revival, and it is the job of an introduction to unpick them. Context means little without text, however, and many readers will be unfamiliar with more than a small proportion of the works discussed here. In addition to thumbnail narratives of political and dramatic history, this book therefore reproduces and briefly examines key passages from two dozen or so of the most distinctive Restoration plays, in the hope of conveying something of their individual colour and impact, as well as their relationship to contextual themes and critical controversies: a primer in the primary material, so to speak. There is no attempt at – and no room for – a comprehensive review of recent criticism, but there is a discursive guide to further reading for those who wish to take the subject further.