SOURCE: Dobrée, Bonamy. “The Framework” and “The Comedy of Manners.” In Restoration Comedy: 1660-1720, pp. 17-30;31-8. 1924. Reprint. London: Oxford University Press, 1958.

In the following excerpts from a work originally published in 1924, Dobrée provides background on Restoration society and describes differences between the comedy of manners and the earlier comedy of humours.

The Framework

Let us first examine briefly the soil in which this comedy grew.

The most hasty student of history regards the quarter-century succeeding the Restoration as one of unbridled licence, in which everybody from the king downwards was corruptible. He learns that morality was in abeyance, or at least submerged under a flood of not altogether joyous wickedness, and that ‘polite’ society was engaged in consciously living to the top of its bent, determined to extract what pleasure it could out of life. But this, of course, was not true of the whole...