Restoration Comedies: Discussion of Love and Marriage

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: Restoration Comedies, language: English, abstract: Two Restoration Comedies that I want to discuss are William Wycherley's The Country
Wife (1675) and William Congreve's Love for Love (1695). Both plays were written in a time
when libertinism prevailed and male stereotypes like rakes and fops and female stereotypes
like wives and virgins were popular. Needless to say, both plays not only deal with
Restoration society but also with its problems, concerns, and difficulties at the time. And
especially, Love for Love, which was written fairly at the end of the Restoration era, still is a
conventional play in terms of being libertine-satirical but it already includes some features of
sentimentalism. So it is not a postponement from libertinism to sentimentalism yet, but I want
to argue in this essay that both plays are rather conventional libertine Restoration plays which
include features of early sentimentalism.