Marriage and its discontents lie at the heart of Restoration comedy. In all four of the great plays gathered here, a married woman confronts her would-be seducer. Each dramatist, however, totally reinterprets the situation. Thomas Otway's The Soldier's Fortune converts adultery into political revenge. Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleves offers a potent and perplexing portrait of a libertine in action at the sixteenth-century French court. John Dryden's Amphitryon, set in ancient Thebes, retells the story in which Jupiter lures the virtuous Alcmena into cuckolding her husband by a stratagem that throws into doubt the very nature of human identity. Thomas Southerne's The Wives' Excuse reinvents, for the new circumstances of the 1690s, the familiar Restoration plot of a wife spurred towards infidelity by her partner's failings. All of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation.

Thomas Shadwell, The Libertine * George Etherege, The Man of Mode * Thomas Durfey, A Fond Husband * Thomas Otway, Friendship in Fashion These four plays in the Oxford English Drama series capture the range of responses to the fashionable and daring libertine movement in the second half of the seventeenth century. A Fond Husband and Friendship in Fashion are lesser-known comic gems of the Restoration stage; The Man of Mode is Etherege's masterpiece, and The Libertine is Shadwell's experimental and dark version of the Don Juan story. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. There is a critical introduction, wide-ranging annotation, and an informative bibliography which together illuminate the plays' cultural context and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike. 'The series should shape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University

This book provides a taxonomy of prologues and epilogues with a corresponding appendix, and demonstrates through case studies of Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield how the study of prologues and epilogues enriches Restoration theater scholarship.

Wycherley's four comedies are admired for their satirical wit, farcical humour, vivid characterization, and social criticism.Love in a Wood, a lively comedy of intrigue, established him as a brilliant new dramatist.The Gentleman Dancing-Master, in contrast, disappointed contemporary audiences,but the central relationship between Hippolyta and Gerrard features an original and sympathetic study of a young woman's attitudes and feelings. The Country Wife is a sharp but also highly amusing attack on social and sexual hypocrisy. The Plain Dealer, a powerful dramatic satire loosely based onMoliere's Le Misanthrope, continues and enlarges Wycherley's assault on greed and corruption.Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction, a note on staging, and detailed annotation.

The standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States since the beginning of the 20th century, Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections has undergone seven previous editions, the latest in 1988, covering 1900 through 1985. In this new edition, Denise Montgomery has expanded the volume to include collections published in the entire English-speaking world through 2000 and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors. Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume is a valuable resource for libraries worldwide.

During the period of European revolutions the British Romantic theatre found itself reexaming the whole cast of social and sexual relations. The five plays grouped here represent some of the most radical and unusual examples of Romantic drama: Horace Walpole invented gothic melodrama with hisincest tragedy, The Mysterious Mother (1768), and Robert Southey imagined the theatre as a site of revolutionary protest in Wat Tyler (1794). Joanna Baillie's psychological case study in aristocratic hatred, De Monfort (1768) was thought too alarming to have been written by a woman, while ElizabethInchbald's hugely successful Lovers' Vows (1798) was sufficiently subversive for Jane Austen to analyse some of its illicit potential in Mansfield Park (1814). Byron's strenuous tragedy The Two Foscari (1821) explores an inescapable conflict between parental love and political authority. The stageimagined by these writers is an arena of tense and embattled desires, with sexual and political claims mapped onto the same conflicts of power. This exciting edition is the only one of its kind and provides the first authorized texts of the plays complete with fully-researched reference to majorauthorial revision.

This anthology brings together a stimulating and entertaining collection of works from the confident and creative period of 1660-1700. The literature of this time is by turns refined, poignant, and brash. Alongside major works such as Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel and Mac Flecknoe, printed in their entirety, is a substantial group of lyrics by Rochester, while Milton's Paradise Lost provides a running commentary on the Restoration scene. Scurrilous satires and pamphlets, diaries, theatrical prologues, translations and striking work by women poets and autobiographers illustrate the period in politics, religion, philosophy and in attitudes to town and country, love and friendship.