Approaching the Restoration theatre

Paradoxically, the theatre of the English post-Restoration seems more remote to us than the theatre of Shakespeare, Jonson and Webster. The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre has been fully assimilated by modern and post-modern stagecraft, but the theatre of the Restoration, Georgian and Victorian years – from Dryden, Wycherley and Aphra Behn through Goldsmith and Sheridan to the dawn of the modern day – largely remains encapsulated in its historical and theatrical milieu. The Importance of Being Earnest scintillates in 1930s finery, but The Beaux’ Strategem is almost never mounted in late Victorian lounge suits or Congreve as if contemporary to Coward. In recent times ’Tis Pity She’s aWhore has been set in a romantic faux Regency surround and The Merchant of Venice in a fascist, anti-Semitic Italy; by the same token, the Elizabethan-Jacobean repertory has been cloaked in the modernist panoply of Gordon Craig or Granville Barker. But Boucicault’s comedies and Pinero’s farces still walk unmediated in the costume of their day. We simply do not treat post-Restoration plays metaphorically, whether historically or stylistically. True classics of the theatre are timeless, we think, and may be redressed in the habits of any amenable time, but plays from the days of Charles II to the near end of the nineteenth century have yet to become classics in the theatre, though some have done as literary art. A greater leap of historical imagination is therefore required to understand the post-Restoration theatre for what it is and to measure its considerable aesthetic and cultural distance back from our own time.