ABSTRACT
This study shows that the emergence of the comic reform plot at the end of the seventeenth century was not just a turn towards sentimentality or morality. As a dramatic device or generic expectation, the moral reform solution was completely congenial to the temper of the age, quickly becoming naturalized as the right and proper mode of treating errant characters. If The Suspicious Husband represents the maturation of the comic reform plot as it develops in the early eighteenth century, we can also discern seeds of change in this play. The primary cultural work that reform comedy in the first half of the century does is to facilitate the emergence of middling-class values by anathemizing aristocratic mores. Reform comedy captures vital literary and social imperatives of the eighteenth-century as they relate to the shifting economic or political mood of the nation.
