Restoration Comedy: Wit and Manners

Core Idea

Restoration comedy (late 17th-century English theatre) is characterized by witty, sophisticated dialogue, sexual intrigue, social satire, and morally ambiguous protagonists navigating high society. These plays often mock prudishness and social hypocrisy through clever wordplay and absurd situations, creating comedy of manners. Restoration comedy prioritizes verbal brilliance and social critique over broad slapstick.

How It's Best Learned

Read a play by Congreve, Etherege, or Wycherley and track the wordplay and verbal wit. Notice how the dialogue itself is a form of power and seduction. Pay attention to what social behavior is being satirized.

Common Misconceptions

Restoration comedy is not vulgar or crude despite its sexual content—its power lies in sophisticated language and wit. The morality is complex, not straightforwardly condemning or approving of character behavior.

Explainer

From your study of comic structure and satire in drama, you know that comedy exposes incongruity — the gap between what is claimed and what is real, between social pretension and human actuality. Restoration comedy sharpens this to a specific social register: the world of late 17th-century London aristocratic and upper-bourgeois society, where reputation, wit, and sexual intrigue were currency, and where appearing to know the rules of the social game mattered more than any underlying moral sincerity. The plays of William Congreve, George Etherege, and William Wycherley are comedies of manners — satires of a world that takes its own codes of behavior with absolute seriousness while being entirely cynical about the values those codes supposedly uphold.

The historical context matters for understanding the tone. Restoration comedy emerged after the re-establishment of the monarchy in 1660 following two decades of Puritan Commonwealth rule, during which the theatres had been closed. The court of Charles II, just returned from France, was ostentatiously libertine — a deliberate repudiation of Puritan morality. Restoration comedy is, among other things, an aristocratic genre that mocks bourgeois prudishness and celebrates wit as the aristocratic virtue par excellence. To have wit — to see through pretension, to speak brilliantly, to outmaneuver rivals with language — is to be genuinely superior in this world. To be earnest, sincere, or sexually naive is to be ridiculous.

The wit combat is the central dramatic mechanism. In Congreve's *The Way of the World*, Mirabell and Millamant conduct their courtship through elaborate verbal sparring — each testing the other's intelligence, sophistication, and refusal of sentimentality. The famous "Proviso Scene" in which they negotiate the terms of their marriage is less a romantic declaration than a contract between equals who respect each other's independence. This is unusual in 17th-century drama: the heroine who is as witty and self-possessed as the hero, who holds her own in the linguistic contest rather than simply being won. Wit in Restoration comedy is both a social performance and a test of character.

The satire is targeted at the would-be wits — characters who want to be sophisticated but lack the intelligence or self-awareness to carry it off. The foolish country squire, the aging rake who refuses to recognize his obsolescence, the social climber whose pretensions are transparent — these figures are the comedy's victims. But Restoration comedy's moral world is not simple. The characters we admire (the genuine wits) are often duplicitous, morally compromised, and indifferent to others' feelings. Wycherley's *The Country Wife* features a protagonist who feigns impotence to gain sexual access to married women — its comedy depends on admiring the audacity of the scheme even while recognizing its predatory character. This moral complexity is not a flaw but the genre's essential feature: it refuses the consolations of straightforward moral judgment, insisting instead that social intelligence is its own kind of value, however ethically troubling its exercise might be.