In the following essay excerpt, Kaplan studies The Way of the World as a representative twentieth-century revival of a Restoration comedy.

Opening in a small Greenwich Village playhouse in 1924, The Way of the World created a considerable stir among New York theatregoers. The play was a novelty to many, "so old," one reviewer said, "that it is new." The play, however, seemed fresh and unusual not simply because of its age but because it had not been seen and heard for a long time. Considered too bawdy for public performances, most Restoration comedies had been banished from theatres in Great Britain and the United States for several generations. The necessary prelude to their twentieth-century return to the stage—and to the attention that return generated—was literary. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men of letters such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Edmund...