Comedy of Wit

Comedy of Wit is the term for Restoration Comedy. It refers to plays that were written in the period from 1688 to 1710 in England. It is a comedy in prose that is set in urban London. A common setting is a park. The cast usually consists of a group of young people that seek pleasure. They stem from fashionable families and their ultimate goal is personal fulfilment. They receive opposition from other ridiculed or satirised character-types. Sexual explicitness is one of the main characteristics of a comedy of wit. Restoration comedy inverts or parodies the conventions of pastoral intrigue. Nevertheless, "Restoration comedy is to be distinguished from its two rival forms of intrigue play - the 'Spanish' play and the tragi-comic romance - not simply by its insistence on a contemporary London setting, but by the social and psychological contingencies that accrue from this limited and apparently contradictory claim on the real." (Burns 14-15)

The term "wit" that classifies this type of plays is "the ability to use social and linguistic artifice for personal ends" (ibid. 17). Wit "overrides 'decorum' - the affirmation of an intrinsically self-righting social order - and thus the plays reach their endings on kinds of contracts, not on an order re-discovered, presumed to have been somehow always 'there' and hence presented as natural." (ibid.)

Critics point out that the comedy of wit has been influenced by the "comedy of manners" by the French playwright Molière (1622-1673) (see Knutson, for example).

There are basically three stages of Restoration comedy. The first evolution of the comedy of wits can be dated to the period from 1660 to 1680. Sir George Etherege (ca. 1635-1692) was amongst the first writers of Restoration comedy. The second phase took place during the Royalist crisis in the 1680s. Here, Restoration comedy was adapted by professional writers. The last phase is often labelled a "revival" (Burns 18), which took place between 1690 and 1700 after the accession of William of Orange. Thomas Southerne (1660-1746) was one of the playwrights of this period.

Examples of Restoration Comedy

Aphra Behn: The Rover (1677)

William Congreve: Love For Love (1695)

William Wycherley: The Country Wife (1675)

Sources

Burns, Edward. Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Knutson, Harold C. The Triumph of Wit: Molière and Restoration Comedy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988.