Writings of the royalists
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
Royalists also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life written by Margaret,
duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of
Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with
no apparent thought of publication. (They were not published in any complete form until,
respectively, 1829 and 1875.) But incomparably the richest account of those years is The History
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon. The work was
begun in exile during the late 1640s and was revised and completed in renewed exile after
Clarendon’s fall from royal favor in 1667. Clarendon was a close adviser to two kings, and his
intimacy with many of the key events is unrivaled. Though his narrative is inevitably partisan,
the ambitious range of his analysis and his mastery of character portraiture make the History an
extraordinary accomplishment. His autobiography, which he also wrote during his last exile,
gravely chronicles the transformations of the gentry world between the 1630s and ’60s.
In 1660, feeling in the country ran strongly in favor of the Church of England, persecution
having confirmed in many a deep affection for Anglican rites and ceremonies. The reestablished
church, accepting for itself the role of staunch defender of kingly authority, tended to eschew the
exploration of ambitious and controversial theological issues and devoted itself instead to
expounding codes of sound moral conduct. It was an age of eminent preachers (including Robert
South, Isaac Barrow, Edward Stillingfleet, and John Tillotson) and of keen interest in the art of
preaching. It was also an age in which representatives of the established church were often
suspicious of the power of preaching, fearing its power to arouse “enthusiasm.” This was the
power that had helped excite the sectarians who had rebelled against their king. It was the power
wielded by men such as Bunyan, who was imprisoned for preaching without a license. In
conscious reaction against the obscurantist dialects judged typical of the sects, a plain and direct
style of sermon oratory was favored. Thus, in his funeral sermon on Tillotson in 1694, Gilbert
Burnet praised the archbishop because he “said what was just necessary to give clear Ideas of
things, and no more” and “laid aside all long and affected Periods.” Sermons continued to be
published and to sell in large numbers throughout the late 17th and the 18th centuries.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in his propagandizing
History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the needs of scientific discovery in
mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses,
a native easiness.” Sprat’s work and a series of books by Joseph Glanvill, beginning with The
Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), argued the case for an experimental approach to natural
phenomena against both the old scholastic philosophy and general conservative prejudice. That a
real struggle was involved can be seen from the invariably disparaging attitude of contemporary
satires to the labors of the Royal Society’s enthusiasts (see, for instance, Butler’s “The Elephant
in the Moon,” probably written in 1670–71, and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, 1676)—a
tradition to be sustained later by Pope and Jonathan Swift.
However, evidence of substantial achievement for the new generation of explorers was
being published throughout the period, in, for example, Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist
(1661), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), John Ray’s Historia Plantarum (in three volumes,
1686–1704), and, above all, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687). Newton’s great work, composed in Latin, was written for fellow mathematicians rather
than for gentlemen virtuosi. Only a select few were able to follow his workings (though his later
Opticks [1704] was aimed at a much wider readership). Yet his theories were popularized by a
small regiment of Newtonians, and by the early 18th century he had become a hero of his
culture.
Locke
The greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton and
some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an “underlabourer” to what today is called a
“scientist.” The philosopher’s role, according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge
language of its mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
The Essay was a founding text of empiricism, arguing that all knowledge comes from
experience, rationally reflected upon. Empiricism rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that
the mind at birth is a tabula rasa. Experience of the world can be accumulated only through the
senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability. The Essay, cautiously concerned to define
the exact limits of what the mind can truly claim to know, threw exciting new light on the
workings of human intelligence and stimulated further debate and exploration through the
fertility of its suggestions—for example, about the way in which ideas come to be associated. It
was hugely influential throughout the 18th century. Locke was also a pioneer in political thought.
He came from Puritan stock and was closely linked during the Restoration with leading Whig
figures, especially the most controversial of them all, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of
Shaftesbury. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690 but written mainly during
the Exclusion Crisis—the attempt to exclude Charles II’s brother James, a Roman Catholic, from
succeeding to the throne—10 years earlier, asserts the right of resistance to unjust authority and,
in the last resort, of revolution. To make this argument, he had to think radically about the
origins of civil society, the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers, and the rights of property.
The resulting work became the crucial reference point from which subsequent debate took its
bearings.
Chroniclers
The Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt at an English
biographical dictionary. His labors were aided by John Aubrey, whose own unsystematic but
enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been published in modern times under the title
Brief Lives. After 1688, secret histories of the reigns of Charles II and James II were popular, of
which the outstanding instance, gossipy but often reliable, is the Memoirs of the Count
Grammont, compiled in French by Anthony Hamilton and first translated into English in 1714. A
soberer but still free-speaking two-volume History of My Own Time (published posthumously,
1724–34) was composed by the industrious Gilbert Burnet, bishop of Salisbury from 1689. In the
last months of the life of the court poet John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, Burnet had been
invited to attend him, and, in Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester
(1680), he offered a fascinating account of their conversations as the erstwhile rake edged toward
a rapprochement with the faith he had spurned. Burnet’s account of Rochester’s final faith and
penitence has been doubted by many, yet some of the dialogues that he records seem too
unorthodox to be inventions.
A sparer, more finely focused prose was written by George Savile, 1st marquess of
Halifax, who, closely involved in the political fray for 35 years but remaining distrustful of any
simple party alignments, wrote toward the end of his life a series of thoughtful, wryly observant
essays, including The Character of a Trimmer (circulated in manuscript in late 1684 or very
early 1685), A Letter to a Dissenter (published clandestinely in 1687), and A Character of King
Charles the Second (written after about 1688). He also composed for his own daughter The
Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688), in which he anatomizes, with a
somber but affectionate wit, the pitfalls awaiting a young gentlewoman in life, especially in
marriage.
Diarists
Two great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of the
Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive intelligences. John Evelyn
was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore often unenamored of the conduct he observed
in court circles; but his curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be
Tudor architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric. Samuel Pepys,
whose diary, unlike Evelyn’s, covers only the first decade of the Restoration, was the more self-
scrutinizing of the two, constantly mapping his own behavior with an alert and quizzical eye. He
also described major public events from close up, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire
of London and a naval war against the Dutch. Though not without his own moral inhibitions and
religious gravity, Pepys immersed himself more totally than Evelyn in the new world of the
1660s, and it is he who gives the more resonant and idiosyncratic images of the changing
London of the time. Pepys’s diary is full of the oddities of everyday life: food, places, singular
characters encountered only once. It was written in cipher for no reader other than himself and
gives an often disarming sense of the writer’s weaknesses and his self-interest. (It was not
decoded until the 19th century.)
The court wits
Among the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a special
place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but among them were poets of
some distinction who drew upon the example of gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation
(especially Sir John Suckling, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom
themselves survived into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse). The court
wits’ best works are mostly light lyrics—for example, Sir Charles Sedley’s “Not, Celia, that I
juster am” or Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset’s “Dorinda’s sparkling wit, and eyes.” However,
one of their number, John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, possessed a wider range and richer
talent. Though some of his surviving poetry is in the least-ambitious sense occasional work, he
also produced writing of great force and authority, including a group of lyrics (for example, “All
my past life is mine no more” and “An age in her embraces past”) that, in psychological grasp
and limpid deftness of phrasing, are among the finest of the century. He also wrote the harsh and
scornfully dismissive Satire Against Reason and Mankind (probably before 1676), in which, as
elsewhere in his verse, his libertinism seems philosophical as well as sexual. He doubts religious
truths and sometimes seems to be versifying the scandalous materialism of Thomas Hobbes.
Indeed, some of his verse that vaunts its obscenity has an aspect of nihilism, as if the amoral
sexual epicure were but fending off fear of oblivion. More lightly, Rochester experimented
ingeniously with various forms of verse satire on contemporary society. The most brilliant of
these, A Letter from Artemisia in the Town, to Chloë in the Country (written about 1675),
combines a shrewd ear for currently fashionable idioms with a Chinese box structure that masks
the author’s own thoughts. Rochester’s determined use of strategies of indirection anticipates
Swift’s tactics as an ironist.
John Oldham, a young schoolmaster, received encouragement as a poet from Rochester.
His career, like his patron’s, was to be cut short by an early death (in 1683, at age 30); but of his
promise there can be no doubt. (Dryden wrote a fine elegy upon him.) Oldham’s Satires upon the
Jesuits (1681), written during the Popish Plot, makes too unrelenting use of a rancorous,
hectoring tone, but his development of the possibilities (especially satiric) of the “imitation”
form, already explored by Rochester in, for example, An Allusion to Horace (written 1675–76),
earns him an honourable place in the history of a mode that Pope was to put to such dazzling use.
His imitation of the ninth satire of Horace’s first book exemplifies the agility and tonal resource
with which Oldham could adapt a Classical original to, and bring its values to bear upon,
Restoration experience.
A poet who found early popularity with Restoration readers is Charles Cotton, whose
Scarronides (1664–65), travesties of Books I and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, set a fashion for poetic
burlesque. He is valued today, however, for work that attracted less contemporary interest but
was to be admired by the Romantics William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Charles
Lamb. The posthumous Poems on Several Occasions (1689) includes deft poetry of friendship
and love written with the familiar, colloquial ease of the Cavalier tradition and carefully
observed, idiosyncratically executed descriptions of nature. He also added a second part to his
friend Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler in 1676. A writer whose finest work was unknown
to his contemporaries, much of it not published until the 20th century, is the poet and mystic
Thomas Traherne. Influenced by the Hermetic writings attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth and
by the lengthy Platonic tradition, he wrote, with extreme transparency of style, out of a
conviction of the original innocence and visionary illumination of infancy. His poetry, though
uneven, contains some remarkable writing, but his richest achievements are perhaps to be found
in the prose Centuries of Meditations (first published in 1908).
Dryden
A poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29 years
old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him survives from before that date.
However, for the remaining 40 years of his life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to
the challenges of an unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from 21st-century readers. In
the early part of his career, he was above all a successful dramatist: he wrote heroic plays in
rhyming verse, topical comedies, adaptations of Shakespeare, operas, and subtle tragicomedies.
The great achievements of his later career were in the field of translation, especially from Latin.
This culminated in his magisterial version of the works of Virgil (1697). His demonstration that
English verse could, in some sense, match its Classical models deeply impressed later writers,
notably Alexander Pope. Dryden was profoundly a poet of the public domain, but the ways in
which he addressed himself to the issues of the day varied greatly in the course of his career.
Thus, his poem to celebrate the Restoration itself, Astraea Redux (1660), invokes Roman ideas
of the return of a golden age under Augustus Caesar in order to encourage similar hopes for
England’s future; whereas in 1681 the Exclusion Crisis drew from Dryden one of his
masterpieces, Absalom and Achitophel, in which the Old Testament story of King David, through
an ingenious mingling of heroic and satiric tones, is made to shadow and comment decisively
upon the current political confrontation. Another of his finest inventions, Mac Flecknoe (written
mid-1670s, published 1682), explores, through agile mock-heroic fantasy, the possibility of a
world in which the profession of humane letters has been thoroughly debased through the
unworthiness of its practitioners. The 1680s also saw the publication of two major religious
poems: Religio Laici; or, A Layman’s Faith (1682), in which Dryden uses a plain style to handle
calmly the basic issues of faith, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which an elaborate
allegorical beast fable is deployed to trace the history of animosities between Anglicanism and
Roman Catholicism. In the Glorious Revolution (1688) Dryden stayed loyal to the Catholicism
to which he had converted a few years earlier and thus lost his public offices. Financial need
spurred him into even more literary activity thereafter, and his last years produced not only his
version of Virgil but also immensely skilled translations of Juvenal and Persius, handsome
versions of Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer, and further fine original poetry.
Dryden was, in addition, in Samuel Johnson’s words, the father of English criticism.
Throughout his career he wrote extensively on matters of critical precept and poetic practice.
Such sustained effort for which there was no precedent not only presumed the possibility of an
interested audience but also contributed substantially to the creation of one. His tone is
consistently exploratory and undogmatic. He writes as a working author, with an eye to problems
he has himself faced, and is skeptical of theoretical prescriptions, even those that seem to come
with Classical authority. His discussion of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman in Of
Dramatic Poesie, an Essay (1668) is remarkable as the first extended analysis of an English play,
and his Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire (1693) and the preface to the
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) both contain detailed commentary of the highest order.
A contrary critical philosophy was espoused by Thomas Rymer, an adherent of the most-
rigid Neoclassical notions of dramatic decorum, who surveyed the pre-1642 English drama in
Tragedies of the Last Age (1678) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693) and found it wanting. His
zealotry reads unattractively today, but Dryden was impressed by him, if disinclined to accept his
judgments without protest. In due course the post-1660 playwrights were to find their own
scourge in Jeremy Collier, whose A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage (1698) comprehensively indicted the Restoration stage tradition. The theoretical frame of
Collier’s tract is crude, but his strength lay in his dogged citation of evidence from published
play texts, especially when the charge was blasphemy, a crime still liable to stiff penalties in the
courts. Even so clever a man as the dramatist William Congreve was left struggling when
attempting to deny in print the freedoms he had allowed his wit.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden, as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the day,
producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don Sebastian (1689);
but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy. In this he was typical of his age.
Though there were individual successes in tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice
Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendor of the
Restoration theater lies in its comic creativity. Several generations of dramatists contributed to
that wealth. In the 1670s the most original work can be found in Sir George Etherege’s The Man
of Mode (1676), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676),
and Aphra Behn’s two-part The Rover (1677, 1681). Commentary has often claimed to detect a
disabling repetitiveness in even the best Restoration comic invention, but an attentive reading of
The Country Wife and The Man of Mode will reveal how firmly the two authors, close
acquaintances, devised dramatic worlds significantly dissimilar in atmosphere that set distinctive
challenges for their players. Both plays were to scandalize future generations with their shared
acceptance that the only credible virtues were intelligence and grace, together producing “wit.”
The disturbed years of the Popish Plot produced comic writing of matching mood, especially in
Otway’s abrasive Soldier’s Fortune (1680) and Lee’s extraordinary variation on the Madame de
La Fayette novella, The Princess of Cleve (1681–82). After the Glorious Revolution a series of
major comedies hinged on marital dissension and questions (not unrelated to contemporary
political traumas) of contract, breach of promise, and the nature of authority. These include, in
addition to Amphitryon, Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691), Sir John Vanbrugh’s
The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’
Stratagem (1707). These years also saw the premieres of William Congreve’s four comedies and
one tragedy, climaxing with his masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), a brilliant
combination of intricate plotting and incisively humane portraiture. The pressures brought upon
society at home by continental wars against the French also began to make themselves felt, the
key text here being Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706), in which the worlds of soldier and
civilian are placed in suggestive proximity.
After 1710, contemporary writing for the stage waned in vitality. The 18th century is a
period of great acting and strong popular enthusiasm for the theater, but only a few dramatists—
John Gay, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—achieved writing
of a quality to compete with their predecessors’ best, and even a writer of Sheridan’s undeniable
resource produced in his best plays—The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The
Critic (1779)—work that seems more like a technically ingenious, but cautious, rearrangement of
familiar materials than a truly innovative contribution to the corpus of English comic writing for
the stage. A number of the Restoration masterpieces, however, continued to be performed well
into the new century, though often in revised, even bowdlerized, form, and the influence of this
comic tradition was also strongly apparent in satiric poetry and the novel in the decades that
followed.
