English, Scottish, & Welsh Drama, Family/Domestic Drama, Love & Relationships - Drama
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Overview
Marriage and its discontents lie at the heart of Restoration comedy. In all four of the plays gathered together here for the first time, a married woman confronts her would-be seducer. Each dramatist, however, totally reinterprets that situation. Thomas Otway's The Soldier's Fortune converts adultery into political revenge. Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleves offers a potent and perplexing portrait of a libertine in action at the sixteenth-century French court. John Dryden's Amphitryon, set in ancient Thebes, retells the story in which Jupiter lures virtuous Alcmena into cuckolding her husband by a stratagem which throws into doubt the nature of human identity. Thomas Southerne's The Wives' Excuse reinvents, for the new circumstances of the 1690s, the familiar Restoration plot of a wife spurred towards infidelity by her partner's failings. The texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation. In addition, there is a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation.Book Details
Published
July 1, 1995
Publisher
Oxford ; Oxford University Press, 1995.
Pages
504
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780192825704