THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

lost) by Henry Lawes, boasted ‘a Representation by the Art of Prospective in Scenes and the Story sung in Recitative
Musick’ and included a timely musical debate between Diogenes and Aristophanes on the virtues and demerits of
public amusements. Thomas Killigrew (1612-83), with Davenant a holder of one of the two royal patents granting a
monopoly over London acting, had written, and had possibly seen performed, the bawdy, anti-romantic comedy The
Parson’s Wedding before the theatres were closed in 1642. It was, however, the innovations fostered by the more
extravagant Davenant which appear to have led the way. The introduction of overtures, ‘curtain tunes’, instrumental
interludes, and ‘ayres’ with unsung dialogue led in the early 1690s to some of Purcell’s most interesting public
commissions, but the very use of such music during scene-changes serves as an indicator of the vital changes in
production introduced in the Restoration period. Davenant’s theatres at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Dorset Garden and
Killigrew’s at Drury Lane were expensively designed, purpose-built, and covered. A proscenium arch with flat wings,
painted shutters, and backcloth behind it
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allowed for complex illusions of space and distinct changes of scene. Above all, the actors who performed on a well-lit
apron stage now included women, a result both of the break in the training of boys to play female roles and of the
influence of continental practice.
The active patronage of King Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, assured that the court attended
performances mounted beyond its confines and open, at a somewhat steep cost of one to four shillings, to any who
could afford admission. When Killigrew’s company opened their first theatre (a converted tennis-court) in November
1660 with a performance of the first part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, they were looking back to an established
‘classic’ with a sound royalist theme. The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher continued to hold their own, if
sometimes after a process of cosmetic ‘improvement’. Although the Henry IV plays, Hamlet, Othello, and Julius
Caesar survived without major alteration, and attracted actors of the calibre of Thomas Betterton (1635-1710) (who
was personally tutored in the part of Hamlet by Davenant who claimed to have known the actor first instructed by
Shakespeare himself), Davenant proved to be an efficient cobbler together of texts revised according to new canons of
taste. His The Law Against Lovers (1661-2) ingeniously fused Measure for Measure with Much Ado About Nothing
and his versions of Macbeth and The Tempest (the latter in collaboration with Dryden) allowed for musical and
choreographic spectacle and for a quite excessive symmetry of plotting. Balletic witches and siblings for Miranda and
Caliban apart, the most celebrated and enduring of the Restoration adaptations was Nahum Tate’s History of King
Lear of 1681. Tate (1652-1715), who claimed to have found the original tragedy ‘a heap of jewels, unstrung and
unpolish’t’, hamstrung his own version by omitting the Fool and by introducing a love-plot for Edgar and Cordelia
and a happy ending in which Lear, Cordelia, and Gloucester all survive. In common with Colley Cibber’s
melodramatic simplification of Richard III it was performed, in preference to Shakespeare’s original, until well into
the nineteenth century.
The natural enough preoccupation of much Restoration tragedy with politics also took its cue from Shakespeare, if
a Shakespeare recast in a severely Roman mould. Dryden’s All for Love: or, The World Well Lost (1677) claims to
imitate the style of ‘the Divine Shakespeare’ while radically rearranging the story of Antony and Cleopatra; and
Thomas Otway’s The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1680) loosely adapts elements of Romeo and Juliet in a
charged Roman Republican setting. The steady dignity of Dryden’s blank verse in All for Love, and his decorous
tidying-up of Shakespeare’s complexities of plot in conformity with neo-classical canons, are likely to strike its
modern readers (and its occasional audiences) as more appealing than the ambitious and extravagant heroics of his
earlier tragedies such as Tyrannick Love, or, The Royal Martyr (1669), The Conquest of Granada (1670), and
Aureng-Zebe (1675). Dryden’s fascination with the dilemmas of the great in antique or exotic settings is to some
degree paralleled by that of Otway (1652-85). Caius Marius, like his far
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finer tragedies Don Carlos, Prince of Spain (1676), The Orphan, or, The Unhappy Marriage (1680), and Venice
Preserv’d, or A Plot Discover’d (1682), originally served as vehicles for the tragic histrionics of the actor Thomas
Betterton. All are high-flown and declamatory, showing suffering, emotional conflict, and intrigue shot through with
mawkish sentiment. The situation of the noble Jaffeir, torn by opposed loyalties, in Venice Preserv’d is, however,
handled with real panache, while its echoes of contemporary English plots and counterplots give it a particular
urgency which has ensured its periodic revival.
The Shakespeare who served as an adaptable native model to the writers of tragedy in the 1660s, 1670s and 1680s
proved far less influential on those who evolved a new comic style. If much Restoration tragedy deals with foreign
politics, the comedies of the period are concerned with English philandery. In a period of literary history notable, in
aristocratic circles at least, for its rejection of solemnity and moral seriousness, the darker and more questioning side