ABSTRACT
The desire to 'moralize the stage' in the eighteenth century sprang from a different source from that which resulted in the religious bigotry and psychological repression of the Victorian period: it proceeded from a belief in reason and good nature as the guiding principles of human conduct. The attitude to money in the eighteenth century drama contrasts sharply with the seventeenth century view: that marriage is as much a legal and financial settlement as a personal and spiritual union. If the comedy of manners became more and more anaemic in the eighteenth century, by the beginning of the nineteenth it was effectively dead. The popularity of action-packed melodrama and sentimental moralizing comedy, both vindicating the conduct of the pious underdog, was totally antipathetic to the wit and frankness of the comedy of manners. The development of the novel in the wake of Richardson and Fielding also meant that an educated audience turned away from the theatre for its entertainment.
