Introduction

This book is concerned with Restoration comedy and with those plays written in the eighteenth century which were an attempt to capture something of its spirit. The plays are usually entitled ‘comedy of manners’ or ‘artificial comedy’. Neither title is satisfactory; for ‘artificial’ implies that the plays are divorced from real life and ‘manners’ suggests that they deal only with superficial characteristics of men and women, imposed by a sophisticated and artificial society rather than with the permanent manifestations of human nature and with universal human problems.