What Is Restoration Drama?

Review Articles What Is Restoration Drama? BRIAN CORMAN Robert D. Hume. The Development of the English Drama in th e Late Seventeenth Century Oxford: Clarendon Press 1976. xix, 525. $43.95 It is now over fifty years since Allardyce Nicoll's History of Restoration Drama first appeared. Professor Hume's study is, as his publisher claims, 'the first full-scale account of Restoration drama' since Nicoll's. Its appearance provides an opportunity to consider the changes that have occurred in our understanding of Restoration drama during the middle half of the twentieth century. Though there has been a considerable number of source studies and analyses of aspects of authors or their works, Hume observes that 'what seems singularly lacking in this scholarship is any real sense of what defines this period in dramatic history, and how the plays change over a span of nearly two generations' (p vii). The persistent tendencies to view the plays of the period exclusively as 'heroic' plays and 'comedy of manners' which are gradually supplanted by 'sentimental' drama , to read a limited, non-representative selection of plays and playwrights and generalize from them, and to refuse to recognize just how much change takes place in fifty years have inhibited adequate answers to Hume's principal ques ~ tion: 'What is "Restoration" drama?' His goal is 'to define these changes more precisely by examining a large number of plays with special attention to chronological sequence.' Hume has read every play known to have been performed in London during the period (including five hundred new plays) as well as nearly all of the criticism written about them. To have assimilated all this material and managed to mould it into a single book-length study is no small accomplishment. Early in his study Hume cites Dryden's distinction (from his Ufe of Plutarch) between 'annals' and 'history properly so called'; Annals are 'naked history; or the plain relation of matter of fact, according to the succession of time, divested of all other ornaments. The springs and motives of actions are not here sought, unless they offer themselves, and are UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY; VOLUME XLVIII, NUMBER 1, FALL 1978 0042~0247178hl00-0053 $01 ·50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1978 54 BRIAN CORMAN open to every man's discernment.' History proper seeks to explain these springs and motives of actions. (P 16) Applying Dryden's distinction, Hume explains that Part II of his book 'is a fifty-year survey in which the sequence is examined (closely in itself and with reference to outside events) in search of the springs and motives of change' (p 16). But his 'primary aim,' he adds a few pages later, 'is to show how the drama changed, rather than why'; hence his 'concern is with relatively factual matters' (p 19)' This is fortunate, for it is Hume the annalist rather than Hume the historian who makes this book an important one, a book which should replace Nicoll's as the most trustworthy account of what happened on the English stage in the fifty-year period still conveniently misnamed the 'Restoration.' It is Hume the annalist who is able to complete the profile begun by Nicoll (whose work, it should be noted, has held up extremely well). Nicoll insisted that to understand the period one must look at the bad as well as the good. Like Hume he read widely, and consequently he anticipated Hume's most general conclusions - that the period of fifty (or forty) years required subdivision, that even subdivision does not explain away the remarkable diversity in the drama, and that this diversity is nevertheless accompanied by a high degree of 'interaction, combination and permutation' (Hume, p 19). Hume's most important contribution is his separation of the period into two loosely defined parts. He revives the term 'Carolean' to describe the drama which first appears in the 1660s, coming to fruition in the mid-t670S. By the 16905, he notes, a change has clearly taken place; a new drama, here called'Augustan,' is clearly on the rise, coexisting with, but by 1710 (the terminal date of Hume's study) replacing the Carolean. (Hume's decision to abandon the term 'Restoration' is...