ABSTRACT
Diverse elements went to the making of Restoration comedy.1 When the theatres were reopened in 1660, Davenant’s company revived plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare, and less famous Elizabethans, but no Ben Jonson. Killigrew controlled Jonson, of whose plays he used seven. The critics praised chiefly Jonson,2 Beaumont and Fletcher,3 and Shakespeare-the last of whom had much influence on tragedy but less on comedy. Jonson contributed a popular type of low comedy, and his method of characterization by means of humors was common throughout the whole century. Idealistic romanticism was “out” in comedy; in its place appeared a somewhat skeptical attitude towards life, derived perhaps from the ro mances of Beaumont and Fletcher and from such realistic intrigues as those in Fletcher’s Wild-Goose Chase and The Chances-which last the Duke of Buckingham, in February, 1667, made into a very typical Restoration comedy. Writers like Middleton and Shirley showed the way to knotted intrigues and to local color within the environs of London. For plot materials and for a sense of the comedy inherent in social aberration Molière was enormously influential on all the English comic writers of the period.4 Spanish comedy, too, encouraged bustling plots, and the Spanish novelas furnished tricks of intrigue for many plays. Plautus and Terence had long since been absorbed into both the English and the French comic traditions; but in their own right the Romans still had direct influence.
