Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency; this is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.

In Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood Remarriage Films, Elizabeth Kraft brings the canon of Restoration comedy into the conversation initiated by Stanley Cavell in his book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Before there could be imagined remarriages of the sort Cavell documents, there had to be imagined marriages of equality. Such imagined marriages were first mapped out on the Restoration stage by witty pairs such as Harriet and Dorimant, Millamant and Mirabell, and Alithea and Harcourt who are precursors of the central couples in films such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and The Lady Eve. In considering the Restoration comedy canon in one-on-one discourse with the Hollywood remarriage comedy canon, Kraft demonstrates the indebtedness of the twentieth-century films to the Restoration dramatic texts-and the philosophical richness of both canons as they explore the nature and significance of marriage as pursuit of moral perfectionism. Her book will be of interest to specialists in Restoration drama and film scholars.

Deborah C. Payne explores how the duopoly of 1660 impacted company practices, stagecraft, the box office, and actors and writers.

Ways of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments—global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication—this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period—including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers—helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.

"Explores Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs, demonstrating that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters"--Publisher.

This volume highlights the variety of forms comedy took in England, with reference to developments in Europe, particularly France, during the European Enlightenment. It argues that comedy in this period is characterized by wit, satire, and humor, provoking both laughter and sympathetic tears. Comic expression in the Enlightenment reflects continuities and engagements with the comedy of previous eras; it is also noted for new forms and preoccupations engendered by the cultural, philosophical, and political concerns of the time, including democratizing revolutions, increasing secularization, and growing emphasis on individualism. Discussions emphasize the period's stage comedy and acknowledge comic expression in various forms of print media including the emerging literary form we now know as the novel. Contributions from scholars reflect a wide variety of interests in the field of 18th-century studies, and the inclusion of a generous number of illustrations throughout demonstrates that the period's visual culture was also an important part of the Enlightenment comic landscape. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to Enlightenment comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Works attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious; Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy The Rover; and seventeenth-century dialogues that include both a Catholic treatise promoting women's entrance into European convents and a proto-pornographic exposé of such convents. Convents, novices, and problem plays emerge as parallel sites of ambiguity that reflect the social, political, and religious uncertainties England faced after the Reformation.