SOURCE: An introduction to in Restoration Comedy, 1660–1720, 1924. Reprint by Greenwood Press, 1981, pp. 9–16.

An English historian and critic, Dobrée distinguished himself both as a leading authority on Restoration drama and as a biographer who sought, through vivid depiction and style, to establish biography as a legitimate creative form. In the following excerpt, Dobrée comments on the relationship between comedy and political change, and describes what he considers to be the three distinct types of comedy.

In the history of dramatic literature there are some periods that can be labelled as definitely 'tragic', others as no less preponderatingly 'comic', though of course both forms exist side by side throughout the ages. Taking the period of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Corneille as markedly 'tragic', we find that these writers throve in a period of great national expansion and power, during which values were fixed and positive. At such times there...