Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration

Krutch, Joseph Wood

doi:10.7312/krut90692

Cited by 34 publications

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“…Gauge the excise man, the hunchbacked barber, and two or three other gentlemen. (V.i [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Furthermore, Farquhar's Squire has a tendency to act and behave like city people in relation to his wife and in relation to the concept of honor.…”

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The other Foot in George Farquhar’s: The Beaux Stratagem

Jamil¹

2020

IJELS

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This article is designed to highlight the innovation of George Farquhar in his playThe Beaux Stratagem, and to illuminate the factors behind its everlasting appeal to audiences since its first performance in 1707 and after. The play still retains a magnificent appeal to all audiences for centuries, and remains alluring and fascinating to even the 21 st Century audiences. Its magnitude lies in the sure-fire comic devices and witty characters as well in the profound insight adjoined the comic situations and events. As a transitional playwright, Farquhar has one foot in the declining traditions of the Comedy of Manners, and the other foot in the growing vogue of Sentimental Comedy, employing some character types of the old tradition with innovative alteration, together with introducing prototypes of the coming sentimental types. To keep pace with the shift in tone, he modifies the purpose of his play to suit the specifications of critics, moralists and theatre goers. With its innovative particulars, it sets an early premise for the approaching changes in the dramatic conventions and trends of the 18 th Century comedies. More crucially, it forms a gateway to move into the world of sentimentalism, or a bridge between the two.

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The other Foot in George Farquhar’s: The Beaux Stratagem

Jamil¹

2020

IJELS

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“…Defoe read him with approval', falling back on the cliche that 'Bedford represented merely the extreme of the spirit generally widespread -the spirit of the once dominant Puritan'. 14 Even less sympathetic is Jonah Barish, who wrongly assumes Bedford to be a `dissenting parson', presumably because as `a hard-shelled fundamentalist, he reverts with crashing emphasis to the old Puritan charge of idolatry', displaying `a truly horrendous grimness and humourlessness'. 15 The use of the term Puritan here, in good seventeenth-century style, as a marker of disapprobation and distancing, is significant, not least because the association of providentialism and the reformation of manners with `puritanism' has been one of the chief barriers, now largely dismantled, to the recovery of the importance of these movements within the post-Restoration and post-Revolutionary Church of England.…”

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Hell upon Earth or the Language of the Playhouse

Barry¹

2001

Languages of Witchcraft

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In 1719 the Reverend Arthur Bedford, rector of Newton St Loe in Somerset, published a book running to 400 pages, entitled, A Serious Remonstrance in Behalf of the Christian Religion, against the Horrid Blasphemies and Impieties which are still Used in the English Playhouses, to the Great Dishonour of Almighty God and in Contempt of the Statutes of this Realm. Shewing their Plain Tendency to Overthrow all Piety, and Advance the Interest and Honour of the Devil in the World; from almost Seven Thousand Instances, Taken out of the Plays of the Present Century, and especially of the Last Five Years, in Defiance of all Methods hitherto Used for their Reformation. 1 As the title suggests, this offered an exhaustive analysis of the language used in the texts of the plays recently performed and published, intended to demonstrate that such language amounted to a conspiracy to invert the religious order of England, replacing the authorised language of the Bible and Protestant Christianity with diabolic and pagan language, such that participation in the theatre was, in effect, the worship of the Devil. Stuart Clark's work has recently reminded us, not only of the general importance of reading demonologies in their appropriate intellectual and linguisticcontext, but of the specific need to consider the full range of writings of demonologists and, equally, the demonological content of many writings of the early modern period that were not, formally speaking, demonologies. 2 This essay offers such a reading of the demonological ideas contained in the antitheatrical writings of Arthur Bedford, seen in the context of his publications as a whole and his participation in various movements. His writings, in turn, offer us a distinctive reading of the use of demonological and witchcraft imagery in the plays of the early eighteenth century. The word "reading" is doubly significant here, because Bedford's study of these plays was entirely based on the written texts of the plays concerned, since his religious views

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Restoration Drama after the Restoration: The Critics, the Repertory and the Canon

Corman¹

2001

A Companion to Restoration Drama

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Comedy and Conscience After the Restoration

Cited by 34 publications

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The other Foot in George Farquhar’s: The Beaux Stratagem

The other Foot in George Farquhar’s: The Beaux Stratagem

Hell upon Earth or the Language of the Playhouse

Restoration Drama after the Restoration: The Critics, the Repertory and the Canon

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