Restoration Theatre

Restoration Theatre, critical term for the period of English theatre following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, sometimes imprecisely extended to the death in 1707 of George Farquhar, the last major writer of the “comedies of manners” distinctive to the period. The London playhouses having remained closed from 1642 for the 18 years of the English Civil War and Cromwellian Commonwealth, one of the first enactments of the new monarch, Charles II, was to issue royal patents permitting two courtier playwrights, Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant, to form acting companies under the patronage of himself and his brother, the Duke of York. At first playing in converted real tennis courts, these companies soon settled into new, purpose-built playhouses, respectively in Drury Lane and Dorset Garden. After 1682, as audiences became increasingly preoccupied with political matters, a single United Company sufficed, playing at Wren's rebuilt Drury Lane until the period's leading actor, Thomas Betterton, led a disaffected group to compete from Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1695.

Restoration playhouses were innovatory in their use of perspective scenery (previously used only for court masques), set beyond a proscenium arch. The actors played on an apron stage in front of the proscenium, in close proximity to an audience totalling less than 1,000. These spectators, drawn more exclusively than before from a social elite, were distributed between a “pit” area fronting the stage, tiers of boxes forming the perimeter of the auditorium, and two shallow galleries—to the uppermost of which the middle and lower classes were largely confined. In contrast with the earlier all-male companies, female actors now took female roles, an innovation made ostensibly on moral grounds, although in practice the comedies of the period, reflecting in heightened form the preoccupations of their audiences, typically portayed the sexual chase, pursued through a verbally centred eroticism.

To the contrast between the small but carefully structured output of such courtly writers as Sir George Etherege and Sir William Wycherley, and the prolific canon of such hard-working professionals as John Dryden and Aphra Behn, must be added the contrast between all these playwrights of the “Restoration proper” and those of the succeeding generation. Thus, despite their early success, both William Congreve and Sir John Vanbrugh had withdrawn from theatrical activity by the century's end, following the influential campaign of the censorious bishop, Jeremy Collier, for a drama reflecting the morality of an increasingly dominant bourgeoisie.