It is easy to oversimplify in defining the character of the Restoration period because the comedies of the age stamp, in our minds, the picture of a frivolous society ready to trivialize human relationships, to treat love and marriage flippantly, and to show scant regard for the vitures of hard work, sobriety, and unselfishness. Indeed, the public that supported the London theater was a very different public from the seemingly mixed cross-section of the populace who attended the Globe Theater in Shakespeare’s day. The Restoration theater provided amusement for a leisured and dissolute society taking its cue from a dissolute court. Puritans, naturally, shunned it. The respectable Londoners who earned their livings by honest trade or craft could scarcely be expected to throng to see themselves made butts of upper-class mockery. The court of Charles II certainly contained more than its fair share of cynical libertines who made a mockery of virtue and assumed all its advocates to be hypocrites. This was the public which relished the antics of Horner in Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) when he passed himself off as a eunuch in order to gain admission to feminine circles and seduce women under the noses of their husbands and guardians. But, The Country Wife was, certainly, not representative of the spirit of the kingdom as a whole. Milton’s Paradise Lost was published in 1667 and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. The civil struggle may have been settled, politically, in favor of the monarchy and the Church of England – and against the Puritans – but the moral and theological struggle continued in literary productivity and in commentary upon it.
The Restoration age was not a period weak in artistic or scientific achievement. It was in 1666 that a falling apple focused Isaac Newton’s attention on the fact of gravitation. In the 1660s, Sir Christopher Wren was designing the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford and, by 1675, he began directing the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral. In 1667, the Earl of Clarendon went abroad to work on his massive historical masterpiece The History of the Rebellion, which was published posthumously in 1702-1704. In 1677, Henry Purcell, at the age of eighteen, was appointed “Composer in Ordinary” at the Chapel Royal. Not that these were publicly calm decades in all respects. The Great Plague of London in 1665, the Dutch War and the Fire of London in 1666, the Titus Oates plot in 1678, the murder of Archbishop Sharp by Scottish Covenanters in 1679, and James II’s brief reign from 1685-1688 provided a turbulent prelude to the establishment of the more tolerant and settled regime of William and Mary. William was the son of Charles I’s daughter, Mary, and Mary was the daughter of James II. The Bill of Rights of 1689 not only settled the question of succession to the throne but, also, protected the liberties of the subjects.
One of the effects of the succession of William and Mary was to put an end to the ascendancy of the royal court as the place where the fashions were set, where the arts were fostered, and where public positions and reputations were to be obtained. The court became the place where royalty lived in comparative privacy, at a distance from its subjects. People now had to turn to ministers, members of Parliament, and the landed aristocracy in search of patronage.
From: A History of Literary Criticism by Harry Blamires (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 103-104.
