Comedy of Manners | Bonamy Dobrée (essay date 1924)
Bonamy Dobrée (essay date 1924)
SOURCE: Dobrée, Bonamy. “The Framework” and “The Comedy of Manners.” In Restoration Comedy: 1660-1720, pp. 17-30;31-8. 1924. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.
[In the following excerpts from a work originally published in 1924, Dobrée provides background on Restoration society and describes differences between the comedy of manners and the earlier comedy of humours.]
THE FRAMEWORK
Let us first examine briefly the soil in which this comedy grew.
The most hasty student of history regards the quarter-century succeeding the Restoration as one of unbridled licence, in which everybody from the king downwards was corruptible. He learns that morality was in abeyance, or at least submerged under a flood of not altogether joyous wickedness, and that ‘polite’ society was engaged in consciously living to the top of its bent, determined to extract what pleasure it could out...
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