Synopses & Reviews
Marriage and its discontents lie at the heart of Restoration comedy. In all four of the great plays gathered here, a married woman confronts her would-be seducer. Each dramatist, however, totally reinterprets the situation. Thomas Otway's The Soldier's Fortune converts adultery into political revenge. Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleves offers a potent and perplexing portrait of a libertine in action at the sixteenth-century French court. John Dryden's Amphitryon, set in ancient Thebes, retells the story in which Jupiter lures the virtuous Alcmena into cuckolding her husband by a stratagem that throws into doubt the very nature of human identity. Thomas Southerne's The Wives' Excuse reinvents, for the new circumstances of the 1690s, the familiar Restoration plot of a wife spurred towards infidelity by her partner's failings. All of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation.
Synopsis
Marriage and its discontents lie at the heart of Restoration comedy. In all four of the great plays collected here, a married woman confronts her would-be seducer. Each dramatist, however, reinterprets this situation in a novel way. Rich, inventive, and diverse, the plays demonstrate the
vigor with which the institution of marriage was treated in the post-1660 playhouse.
About the Author
Michael Cordner, the General Editor of the new Drama titles in World's Classics, is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Englis and related Literature at the University of York.
Table of Contents
Includes:
The Soldier's Fortune, by Thomas Otway;
The Princess of Cleves, by Nathanial Lee;
Amphitryon, by John Dryden;
The Wives Excuse, by Thomas Southerne.