Restoration Literature (1660-1700)

On 29 May 1660, the day he turned thirty, Charles II rode into London as king. Bells rang, and crowds filled the streets to watch a king come home. Eleven years earlier, in January 1649, his father Charles I had been beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall.

Those eleven years had been strange ones for England. Parliament had beaten the king in a civil war, abolished the monarchy, and ruled the country as a republic, led for most of those years by the soldier Oliver Cromwell. The government had closed the theatres in 1642 and looked sternly on many public pleasures. Now the king, the bishops and the stage all came back together.

The years from 1660 to 1700 are called the Restoration. The name comes from the restoring of the king, but the age was larger than one man's return. It gave English literature witty comedies for a pleasure-loving court, sharp political satire, plain and clear prose, and a woman, Aphra Behn, who earned her living by her pen. It also gave two great works from the defeated Puritan side, Milton's epic and Bunyan's allegory. Two Englands lived side by side in these years, a merry court and a serious Puritan world that refused to disappear.

The world of this age

Political life

The republic did not last long after Oliver Cromwell died in September 1658. His son Richard became Lord Protector but had none of his father's authority, and in 1659 the army pushed him aside. England drifted toward new disorder. General George Monck, who commanded the army in Scotland, marched south to London in early 1660. A new Parliament met and invited Charles to come home.

Charles had prepared the way. In April 1660 he issued the Declaration of Breda from the Dutch town where he was staying. It promised pardon to most of his enemies and "liberty to tender consciences" in religion. He knew exile well. After his father's death he had tried to win the crown back, had been beaten at Worcester in 1651, and had then lived for nine years in France and the Netherlands. Those years taught him French manners and an easy, cynical charm.

The pardon had limits. Men who had signed the death warrant of Charles I were hunted down. In October 1660 one of them, Thomas Harrison, was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross, and the young official Samuel Pepys saw it. In January 1661 the bodies of Cromwell and two other republican leaders were dug up and hanged at Tyburn.

The reign was never calm for long. Charles had no lawful child, so his heir was his brother James, Duke of York, a Roman Catholic. Many English Protestants feared Catholics, and they feared France, where the powerful Louis XIV was a Catholic king. Charles was also short of money, because Parliament controlled taxes. In 1670 he made a secret treaty with Louis XIV at Dover in return for French money. The country fought the Dutch twice, in 1665-67 and 1672-74, over trade and sea power.

In 1678 fear turned into panic. A man named Titus Oates claimed that Catholics were plotting to kill the king. The story was false, but this "Popish Plot" led to the execution of innocent people. Between 1679 and 1681 Parliament tried to pass laws to keep James from the throne. This struggle is called the Exclusion Crisis. Its leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, backed Charles's illegitimate Protestant son, the Duke of Monmouth, as heir. Those who wanted to exclude James and those who defended his right to rule hardened into rival parties, later called Whigs and Tories. Charles refused to give way, dissolved Parliament in 1681, and ruled without it for the rest of his reign. Shaftesbury was tried for treason that year and was acquitted.

Charles died in February 1685, and James II became king. Monmouth rose in rebellion the same year, but his army was crushed at Sedgemoor. James then gave high posts to Catholics, and many Protestant leaders turned against him. In 1688 they invited the Dutch prince William of Orange, who was married to James's Protestant daughter Mary. James fled, and William and Mary were crowned together in 1689. This change is called the Glorious Revolution. It left Parliament stronger than the crown.

Social life

The court set the tone of the age. Charles loved wit, music, horse racing and clever company, and he kept mistresses openly. One of them, the actress Nell Gwyn, was among the best-known women of the stage. His father's court had been grave and serious. The new court was cultured, playful and openly pleasure-loving.

After years of Puritan rule, many people welcomed the change. Plays, dancing, Christmas feasts and village maypoles had all been discouraged or banned, and they returned. The returning court had also spent its exile in France, so French fashions, French manners and French ideas about writing came home with it.

London was by far the largest city in the country, and much of its talk happened in the coffee houses, where men drank coffee, read the news and argued about politics and poetry. Writers had favourite houses. Dryden is linked with Will's Coffee House in Covent Garden.

Then came two disasters. In 1665 plague swept the city and killed tens of thousands of Londoners. The court left, and the theatres were closed. In the early hours of 2 September 1666 a fire began in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane and burned for several days. It destroyed about 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches and St Paul's Cathedral. The architect Christopher Wren designed a new St Paul's and many new churches, and London rose again in brick and stone.

Economic life

London was also a great port. Ships carried cloth, sugar, tobacco and spices, and tea and coffee were becoming common. Parliament passed Navigation Acts in the 1660s to make sure that trade with the English colonies travelled in English ships. English ships also carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, a cruel trade that grew in these years.

Trade reached India too. In 1662 Charles married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza. Her dowry included Bombay, which Charles handed to the East India Company in 1668. Catherine praised tea, and the poet Edmund Waller wrote a short poem on the new drink.

The king's money was a constant problem. Parliament voted the taxes, and Charles never had enough. Wars with the Dutch, and later with France, drained the treasury. In 1694 the Bank of England was founded to lend money to the government for its war with France, which gave the state a steadier way to borrow.

Religion

Religion mattered as much as politics. When Charles came home, the Church of England came home with him. The bishops returned, and the Book of Common Prayer was revised for the last time in 1662. It stayed the main Anglican prayer book for about three hundred years.

Charles himself wished for some toleration, as the Declaration of Breda had promised, but the Anglican Parliament did not. It passed laws that pressed Protestants outside the Church to conform. The Corporation Act of 1661 required town officials to take communion in the Anglican way. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 required every minister to accept the Prayer Book. The Conventicle Act of 1664 banned religious meetings in private houses, and the Five Mile Act of 1665 kept banned ministers away from towns. Together these laws are called the Clarendon Code, after Charles's chief minister, the Earl of Clarendon.

The Act of Uniformity took effect on St Bartholomew's Day, 24 August 1662. The Puritan minister Richard Baxter later estimated that about two thousand ministers were driven from their churches. These men and their followers became known as Nonconformists or Dissenters. Some of them went to prison. John Bunyan, a Baptist preacher from Bedford, was arrested in November 1660 for preaching without a licence and stayed in jail for about twelve years.

Roman Catholics were treated even more harshly, because many people believed they served a foreign power. In 1672 Charles tried to ease the laws with a Declaration of Indulgence, but Parliament forced him to withdraw it and passed the Test Act of 1673, which required all holders of public office to follow Anglican practice. Charles himself was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed in 1685. After the Glorious Revolution the Toleration Act of 1689 allowed most Protestant Dissenters to worship openly, though not Catholics.

Literature in this age

The language

The writers of the Restoration had grown up in a time when words were weapons. Preachers, pamphleteers and politicians had filled the air with fiery speeches and very long sentences. Many readers now wanted calm, clear writing.

The new science helped this mood. The Royal Society, a club of people who loved experiment, met in London and received royal charters in 1662 and 1663. Its early members included scientists such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, the architect Christopher Wren, and the writers John Evelyn, Edmund Waller and John Dryden. In 1667 Thomas Sprat published a History of the Royal Society, in which he praised careful experiment as the opposite of the angry passions of the war years. Writers close to the Society preferred a plain, clear style.

The French example added to the change. Charles's followers had lived in France and admired its tidy rules for plays and poems, and English writers began to value order, balance and good sense. In verse this meant the heroic couplet, two rhyming lines of ten syllables each. Sir John Denham's poem Cooper's Hill, first printed in 1642, was taken as a model. Dryden thought it set the exact standard of good writing, and he would make the couplet his own.

The stage and its audience

The biggest change in literature came in the theatre. Parliament had closed all playhouses in 1642 and passed a further order against acting in 1647. For eighteen years plays could be read but not properly performed. One clever man found a way round the ban. In 1656 the playwright William Davenant staged The Siege of Rhodes, a story sung to music, as an "entertainment" in the manner of the ancients. It was an early English opera.

When Charles returned, he gave two men the sole right to stage plays in London. Davenant received one royal patent, and the playwright Thomas Killigrew received the other. Killigrew's King's Company opened in November 1660 in a converted tennis court with Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1. Davenant's company had the Duke of York as its patron and was called the Duke's Company.

The new theatres were nothing like the Globe. They were built for the purpose, roofed and well lit, with names such as Lincoln's Inn Fields, Dorset Garden and Drury Lane. A proscenium arch framed the stage, and painted scenery could be changed in front of the audience. The actors played on an apron stage that reached out into the room. Seats cost between one and four shillings, so the audience was mostly courtiers and well-off townspeople. The king and his brother often attended.

Women now acted on the public stage. During the closure no boys had been trained to play female parts, and actresses were already common on the continent. Pepys, who loved the theatre, noticed the handsome women on the stage with pleasure in 1662. Thomas Betterton became the leading actor of the age and learned the part of Hamlet from Davenant.

Old plays came back, but not unchanged. Davenant and Dryden together rewrote Shakespeare's The Tempest with extra characters, music and dancing. In 1681 Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear with a happy ending in which Lear, Cordelia and Gloucester all survive, and his version held the stage until well into the nineteenth century. The same Pepys thought A Midsummer Night's Dream the silliest play he had ever seen. The taste of the age was not Shakespeare's taste.

Heroic plays and tragedy

The court first wanted grand and noble plays. Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes had pointed the way, and Dryden followed with what are called heroic plays. These plays were written in rhymed couplets and set in faraway lands. Their heroes were larger than life and torn between love and honour. The best known are The Conquest of Granada (1670), set in Spain, and Aureng-Zebe (1675), set at the court of the Mughal emperor in India.

Fashion soon turned against such plays. In December 1671 the Duke of Buckingham's comedy The Rehearsal made fun of them by copying their grand speeches until they sounded silly. Audiences enjoyed the joke, yet they still liked the plays it mocked. Dryden himself changed course. In All for Love (1677) he retold the story of Antony and Cleopatra in blank verse, claiming to follow "the Divine Shakespeare" while tidying the plot into a neater shape.

Thomas Otway wrote the most moving tragedies of the next generation. The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserv'd (1682) were written for the actor Betterton. In the second play the noble Jaffeir is torn between two loyalties, and its plots and counter-plots reminded audiences of the real English plots of the day, so it was revived often.

Comedy of manners

Comedy was the great success of the age. The court and the town liked plays that laughed at love, money and fashion, and that turned the grand ideas of the heroic plays upside down. A comedy of manners is a play about fashionable people in a polished society, driven by wit and by tricks of love. Its setting was London. Its people were young gallants, jealous husbands, country wives and foolish fops, and its chief sport was seduction and the hypocrisy around it. Names told the audience what to expect: Courtall, Lady Cockwood, Sir Fopling Flutter.

Sir George Etherege set the style. His The Comical Revenge was a hit at the Duke's Theatre in 1664, She Would If She Could (1668) was bolder, and The Man of Mode (1676) was his best. Its hero Dorimant is a charming rake who leaves broken hearts behind him.

William Wycherley was sharper. In The Country Wife (1675) a young man named Horner spreads a false rumour that an illness has made him unable to be a lover, so that jealous husbands will trust him with their wives. The trick works, and Horner escapes punishment, while the people who talk loudly of their "honour" are shown to be fools or hypocrites. His The Plain Dealer (1676), partly taken from Molière's Le Misanthrope, is a darker play about an honest man who hates the false manners of society.

A woman now wrote for the stage as well. Aphra Behn (1640-89) had little formal education and had lived for a time in the colony of Surinam in the early 1660s. She wrote for the theatre because she needed money, and she is long said to be the first English woman to earn her living by writing. Her first play, The Forc'd Marriage, was staged in September 1670, and she wrote seventeen more. Her best-known comedy is The Rover (1677), a lively tale of English cavaliers and the women they chase in Naples.

William Congreve brought the form to its height. Born in 1670, he was in his early twenties when The Old Bachelor and The Double-Dealer were staged in 1693. Love for Love followed in 1695 and The Way of the World in 1700. Dryden praised him in a poem as the true heir of Etherege and Wycherley. The Way of the World, in which the witty lovers Mirabell and Millamant bargain over the terms of their marriage, is often named as the finest comedy of the age. Sir John Vanbrugh, now better known as an architect, added The Relapse (1696) with its vain Lord Foppington.

Poetry

Poetry was as divided as the country. At court the poets were wits who wrote with a smile and a sting. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was the cleverest and most scandalous of them. The story goes that when the king said he would allow his friends to speak freely, Rochester wrote a quick rhyme saying that the king never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one. Charles is said to have replied that his words were his own but his actions were his ministers'.

Rochester's A Satyr against Mankind (1675) attacked the idea that human reason could be trusted, and his love songs praised the pleasure of the moment. He lived hard and died in 1680 in his early thirties, after Bishop Burnet sat with him in his last illness and brought him back to the Christian faith.

Samuel Butler used wit against the Puritans. His comic poem Hudibras appeared in three parts, in 1662, 1663 and 1678. It follows a Puritan knight, Sir Hudibras, and his servant Ralpho in a mock-heroic story told in short, bouncing couplets. It was the most popular long poem of its day, and Butler became famous only at the age of forty-nine.

Meanwhile the greatest poet of the defeated side had gone quiet. John Milton had defended the republic in prose, and its fall in 1660 ended his hopes of a Protestant commonwealth. Blind and in danger, he turned from politics to a poem he had long planned. Paradise Lost appeared in 1667 and was revised in 1674. It tells of "Man's First Disobedience", the fall of Adam and Eve, in blank verse, and it asks the reader to think and judge freely, as a Puritan believed everyone should. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes followed together in 1671.

The central figure of the age was John Dryden. Born in 1631, he had written verses on Cromwell's death in 1659, and in 1660 he welcomed the returning king in Astraea Redux. He then became the voice of the restored monarchy. Annus Mirabilis (1667) praised London and the king for surviving the Dutch war and the Great Fire. In 1668 he became Poet Laureate. For the next fourteen years or so he wrote mainly for the stage, which taught him to handle character and quick speech.

Then the Exclusion Crisis gave him a great subject. Absalom and Achitophel (1681) retells the Bible story of Absalom's revolt against his father David. In the poem David stands for Charles II, Absalom for the Duke of Monmouth, and Achitophel for Shaftesbury, who tempts Absalom to rebel. The Duke of Buckingham appears as Zimri. A poem in which real people hide behind other names is called a histoire à clef. Dryden used the heroic couplet to praise and to wound in the same line.

His rival in the theatre, Thomas Shadwell, became the target of MacFlecknoe, begun in the late 1670s and printed in 1682. It is a mock-heroic poem, which treats a small subject in the grand style of epic to make it look foolish. Shadwell is crowned the heir of the dull poet Flecknoe, holding a mug of ale instead of a royal orb. Dryden also wrote Religio Laici (1682), in defence of the Church of England, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), written after he joined the Roman Catholic Church under James II.

The Glorious Revolution cost him his place. Dryden refused to swear loyalty to William and Mary, lost the post of Poet Laureate in 1689, and earned his living by translation. His Virgil (1697), the ode now known as Alexander's Feast (1697) and Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) came from these years. He died on 1 May 1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Women wrote poetry too. Katherine Philips, who wrote as "Orinda", published her Poems in 1664. Anne Killigrew, a maid of honour at court, died of smallpox in 1685 at the age of twenty-five. Dryden wrote an ode on her in 1686, which Samuel Johnson later called the finest ode in the language.

Prose

Samuel Pepys began his diary in January 1660, when England still had no settled government. He was a young official at the Navy Office, and in May he sailed with his patron, Lord Sandwich, to bring Charles home from the Netherlands. The diary went on to record the plague, the Great Fire, court gossip, music, food, quarrels with his wife and his own love affairs, which he sometimes hid in a private mixture of English, French, Italian and Spanish. He kept it until 1669. It was written in shorthand and was not printed until 1825. John Evelyn's diary, by comparison, is calmer and more formal.

John Bunyan, a tinker's son from Bedfordshire, wrote from the other side of the Restoration world. Much of his finest work was written in prison. In Grace Abounding (1666) he told the story of his own religious struggles. Then he turned his experience into a story for everyone. The Pilgrim's Progress (Part I, 1678; Part II, 1684) is an allegory, a tale whose people and places stand for ideas. A man named Christian leaves the City of Destruction and travels through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Valley of the Shadow of Death to reach the Heavenly City. The people he meets have names such as Mr Worldly-Wiseman and Talkative, so the reader knows at once what each one stands for. In the second part his wife Christiana makes the same journey. Bunyan's language is plain, vivid and full of the Bible, and the book was read in ordinary homes for generations.

Aphra Behn wrote prose as well. Her short novel Oroonoko (1688) tells of an African prince who is tricked into slavery in Surinam, the colony where she had once lived. He rises in revolt against his masters, and the story presents him as a noble man and his oppressors as the ones who fail the test of honour.

New ideas also found their way into prose. Isaac Newton's Principia (1687) set out the laws of motion and gravity, and John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) argued that knowledge comes from experience. Dryden wrote the best critical prose of the age, mostly in the prefaces to his own plays and poems.

Criticism and scholarship

Criticism began inside the age itself. Dryden's Of Dramatic Poesie (1668), written in 1665 when the plague had shut the theatres, is a conversation between four speakers who argue about ancient and modern drama and about French and English practice. It is the best critical essay of the age. Thomas Rymer, a stricter critic, judged English tragedy by classical rules, and his A Short View of Tragedy (1693) attacked Shakespeare's Othello. In 1698 Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage attacked the playwrights from the side of religion.

Later readers took sides. Samuel Johnson, in his Life of Dryden (1779), treated Dryden as the father of English criticism, and he called Dryden's ode on Anne Killigrew the noblest in the language. In 1822 Charles Lamb defended the comedies as a make-believe world that should not be judged by real morals. The Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay disagreed. In 1841 he attacked the plays as hard-hearted and immoral. In 1937 L. C. Knights argued that the comedies should be judged against real life, and he found them shallow and dull.

Recent scholars have given new attention to women writers. Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own (1929), said that women owed Aphra Behn a debt for winning them the right to speak their minds. The standard modern edition of Pepys's diary, by Robert Latham and William Matthews, appeared in eleven volumes between 1970 and 1983.

How the age ends

The age did not end on a single day. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 removed the Stuart court that had been the stage's best patron, and royal interest in the theatre fell. William III cared less for plays than Charles had. Around 1690 Dryden wrote in a preface that comedy and tragedy had run out of fresh ideas, that audiences were leaving, and that he was digging in exhausted mines.

At the same time the mood was softening. Comedies of the late 1690s were less hard-hearted and more kindly. In 1698 Jeremy Collier's attack on the stage, which singled out writers such as Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh, gave the critics of the theatre a strong voice. Many playwrights replied, but the stage grew more careful.

Newton's Principia (1687) and Locke's Essay (1690) taught readers to value reason, order and clear thinking. In 1700 Congreve's The Way of the World was staged, and on 1 May that year Dryden died. Scholars do not agree on the end date. Some end the Restoration at 1688 and others at 1700, which takes in Dryden's last years and Congreve's last great comedy. A boy of twelve, Alexander Pope, was then growing up in a world that wanted polish and order, and he would carry Dryden's couplet to its greatest height.

Writers and works

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Sources

• Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Cengage Learning.
• Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Clarendon Press, 1994.

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English