Tag Archives: Restoration comedy

Puritans vs. Cavalier Theatre

Thursday I’m currently immersed in John Stubbs’s Reprobates, an account of the cavalier poets during England’s 17th century civil war. I met John when I was in Ljubljana—he’s married to a Slovenian high court judge and teaches at the international high school—and the work is even more enthralling than his biography of Jonathan Swift, which […]

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Romantic Comedy, A Fruitful Oxymoron

I met with my British Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy class for one last time today.  I baked them a whiskey cake (I do this for all of my classes), and we reflected on the experience of the course. We had undertaken quite a journey, starting out with the scandalous poetry of the licentious […]

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Obama as Wycherley’s Country Wife

As I teach William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, I am struck by the resemblances between Restoration society and our own.The play was written in 1676 during the age of Charles II, and in some ways our worlds couldn’t be more dissimilar.This was a monarchy and a very formal society in which sincerity was viewed with […]

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