What is Restoration comedy? The first temptation is to define the comedy of the fifty years following the restoration of Charles II in the terms used by the playwrights themselves. But it does not require much reading of seventeenth-century comic theory to realize that playwrights and critics shared few assumptions about comedy and fewer conclusions. Most agreed that comedy should meet the Horatian requirements for all literature – that it please and instruct. Most, though not all, privileged instruction over pleasure, since most maintained that the end of comedy was moral. But when the playwrights and critics turned to how that moral end was to be recognized, not to mention realized, they quickly reached the limits of their small consensus.

The best-known exchange of views about comedy in the period took place in the 1660s between two of the most important playwrights, John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, early in their careers as comic writers.