True Comedy?

Abstract Rochester asserted that ‘hasty Shadwell and slow Wycherley’ were the only Restoration dramatists to have ‘touched upon true comedy’, and that ‘refined Etherege’ was the age’s ‘sheer original’. Through examination of three plays that premiered in 1676—Etherege’s The Man of Mode, Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, and Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer—this chapter considers how each dramatist addressed the idea of the present, their debt to sources, and the transformation of performance into printed text. Etherege’s celebration of the present is contrasted with the many-sided disenchantment offered by Wycherley and Shadwell, whose engagement with Molière poses new questions about the reception of French drama. The chapter concludes by comparing how the first editions of the three plays represent authorial voices as well as actors, characters, and dialogue, in the latter case with particular attention to the use of hesitation, deviation, and interruption as means of characterization.