LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Restoration Drama
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"David Womersley's Restoration Drama is easily the most comprehensive anthology available to date. Each of Womersley's introductions to the plays are wonderfully compact mini-guides to the plays, providing information on the author, the sources, the context and stage-history, and pointing out some of the complexities raised by the work. The explanatory notes, though kept to a minimum, are relevant and helpful. What distinuguishes the present collection from its predecessors is the editor's attempt to do justice to the multifarious nature of Restoration drama. All in all . . . this is a most valuable (and moderately priced) collection, which is likely to supersede classroom texts currently used. Future editors and publishers of Restoration plays would do students and scholars a true favour by following Womersley's and Blackwell's lead in striking out in new directions and opening up for further study the full panorama of Restoration drama."
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With the exception of classes on 9/1 and 9/15 and the five classes on Restoration Drama (9/22-10/20) each class will be initiated and focused by at least one student presenter. The anchor of the student presentation will be a formal annotated bibliography on the critical materials related to all or part of the day’s assigned reading. This should be photocopied or posted to the Blackboard site for everyone to share. This critical bibliography should present at least 10 items in separate entries in alphabetical order by author. The annotations should cover a full description (if you are using only part of a reference, make clear how it fits into the whole) and an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. Also summarize the key points that you have gleaned from it.
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Barnard’s views of Charles’ court fall in line with Adams'. He ... points to lax morality as a defining factor of Restoration drama. Whycherly's The Country Wife, for example, features a man who spreads the rumour of his impotency so he can fool around with married women in relative security. Another man desperately tries to keep his young wife faithful. Amoral men and women fill the pages and stages of Restoration England. Charles II set the tone for this sexual freedom. He boasted of his voracious sexual appetite. Because the public emulated the monarch, the immorality and lewd content was judged acceptable.
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For individual dramatists, you should begin your search by consulting the Dictionary of Literary Biography Restoration and Eighteenth-century Dramatists (1st and 2nd and 3rd series, vols. 80-89 circa) ... available online through Literature Resource Center, a Galenet database, searchable by name.
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These include the more recent Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama (ed. J. Douglas Canfield), and the Blackwell anthologies of Restoration Drama (ed. David Womersley), Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (ed. David Fairer & Christine Gerrard), and the wide-ranging if eccentric British Literature 1640-1789 (ed. Robert DeMaria, Jr.).
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Restoration Drama