Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy 1660–1710

Reviews Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy 1660-1710 ROSE A. ZIMBARDO Brian Corman. Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy 1660-1710 Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993. $60.00 cloth Brian Connan's Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy 1660-1710 is an interesting and important book. It will be particularly useful to scholars of late seventeenth-century drama because it offers a theoretical method and a temporal perspective that may finally break the boundaries of the category 'Restoration Comedy: Corman argues 'the need for the "institutional" approach to genre,' 'the recognition that "institutional" genres, likeother institutions, have histories of their own, histories comprising a wide range of changes, some abrupt, some very slow and gradual.' He conceives ofgenre not as category, but as the creator of an horizon of expectation that is in a constant process of change. On the one hand, genre preserves continuity; on the other, it evolves to accommodate new cultural perspectives and attitudes. Following Alastair Fowler, Corman asserts that 'genres have to do with identifying and cornmWlicating rather than with defining and classifying' (quoting Fowler). Genres offer 'interpretive strategies' to readers, to writers, and, indeed1 to audiences at different times during a play's performance history. Offering, as it does, a linear temporal perspective that relates English comedy of the period 1660-1710 to the genre that was its inheritance and to the genre it passed on to its eighteenth-century heirs, Corman's book provides a necessary corrective to some of those recent new historical and cultural materialist approaches that have tended to see the drama only in relation to its immediate culturalcontext (the so-called 'Restoration' powerstructure- sometimeseven, quite erroneously referred to as the 'ancien regime') and to worry such questions as whether or not 'Restoration Comedy' was subversive of, orsupportive of, Stuart authority_ Corman demonstrates the primacy ofJonson and Fletcher in the formation of the genre, comedy, as it was received by the playwrights of the restored theatre. Their task, Cormanbelieves, was to achieve a 'mixt way ofComedy,' a union of Jonsonian 'punitive' comedy and Fletcherian 'sympathetic' intrigue comedy. 'The union of Jonson and Hetcher,' as Corman says,' is rarely an easy one: Nevertheless, that union forms the core of the generic model during the period, and the variation of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 65, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1996 GENERIC CHANGE IN RESTORAnON COMEDY 557 balances between the two poles it attempts to unite for tlu'ee 'generations' of playwrights (1670-75; 1690-95; 1705-10) traces the evolution of the genre from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century. Corman supports his theoretical conception admirably well by closely examining six representative plays from each of the three generations. One of the ways in which writers of the first generation (1670-75) achieved the 'mixt.way' ofcomedy was 'by transferring the licence granted the rogue inpunitive Uonsonianl comedy to the lover of sympathetic [Fletcherian] comedy' to form 'the extravagant rake.' Corman argues that the extravagant rake, while often a sympathetic , even admirable, figure, is not set up for emulation. The character is, indeed, a humours character. Quoting Dennis, Corman demonstrates that 'joy,' 'jollity,' and 'gayety' can be considered 'humours' in this period. 'Extravagance is thus a young man's humour, and, as such, offers a rare example of a humour that is corrected in the comedy of the 1670s.' In the second generation (1690-95) the balance begins to lean toward the 'sympathetic' pole: 'in the nearly-twenty year gap .., of a full generation, significant changes occurred in the conventions of dramatic comedy. The comedy Congreve inherited was quite different from what Wychedey and Crowne had found in the early 1670s.' A significant index of the change is the redefinition of 'humour' that occurs in the Dryden-Dennis-Congreve debate on the subject. Dennis attacks the characterization of Jonson's Morose as 'too extravagant for instruction'; Dryden defends Morose as an object of the audience's malicious ridicule; and Congreve defends 'humour' as an admirable quality, a particularly Englishsingularity, which is ultimately the expression of 'the great Freedom, Privilege and Liberty which the Common People of England enjoy.' In the second generation Humour gives way to...