SOURCE: Waith, Eugene M. “Admiration in the Comedies of Thomas Southerne.” In Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborn, edited by René Welleck and Alvaro Ribeiro, pp. 89-103. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

In the following essay, Waith examines each of Southerne's plays, seeing in them many of the developments that were taking place in English comedy at the close of the seventeenth century.

One of the best-publicized developments in the history of English drama is the sad change of heart (and I use all these words advisedly) that came over the writers of comedy as the eighteenth century neared and then arrived. The publicity is, of course, due in large measure to the efforts of one of those who helped to bring the change about—the divine whose view of the English stage was so very dim. Naturally, then, the virtuous and weepy comedy that...