Plan of the lecture english literature of the XVII century


THE INFLUENCE OF THE RESTORATION PERIOD TO THE LITERATURE



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LECTURE 4

 
THE INFLUENCE OF THE RESTORATION PERIOD TO THE LITERATURE 
 
The English monarchy was restored when Charles II of England (above) became 
king in 1660. The restored monarchy inaugurated a new temper, and a cultural style, 
which lasted. Although things sobered up under King William, Congreve’s 
The Way 
of the World 
(1700) is still a ‘Restoration comedy’. Charles II’s return gave literature 
chances it had not had for eighteen years. The theatres opened, determined to reject 
Puritan earnestness. The king’s friends came back from France with a more secular, 
sceptical and ‘civilized’ tone, and neo-classical ideas. 
The Church of England was reestablished. Charles patronized the Royal Society, 
the Royal Observatory, the theatre and the opera. In 1665-6 the Plague and the Great 
Fire destroyed much of London. Sir Christopher Wren designed fifty-one new 
churches; his St Paul’s Cathedral was completed in 1710. London ‘society’ took shape 
in the new quarter of St James’s. Tea, coffee and chocolate were drunk in places of 
public recreation. Horse-racing became a fixture in a social calendar. It became 
‘civilized’ for men to be agreeable, not to converse on religion and politics. The 


KHILOLA RAKHIMOVA, senior teacher, URSU 

expulsion in 1688 of James II, Charles II’s Catholic brother, led to the exclusion by 
Act of Parliament of Catholics from the succession. In Scotland the Presbyterian 
Church was established by law; should the monarch come north, he was assumed to 
change religion as he crossed the border (as today). Monarchy was limited by 
Parliament, and the City’s commercial interests; the wounds of the Civil War slowly 
healed. The governmental balance struck in the Bloodless Revolution of 1688 prevailed 
in England until the extension of the franchise in the Great Reform Bill of 1832. 
Writing took its tone not from the Court but from a polite society defined by rank, 
property and, increasingly, money. New ideas were diffused in journals. By 1700 a 
book trade had begun to support writers, and to cater for readers of leisure, some of 
‘the fair sex’. Journalism began, sensational or smart. There was also a literature of 
religious and social dissent. In literature the Restoration was a period of novelty, 
change and refoundation rather than of great writing. Apart from 
Paradise Lost 
and the 
1662 Anglican Prayer Book, the only books from these forty years to have been read 
in every generation since are Bunyan’s 
The Pilgrim’s Progress 
(1678-9), some poems 
by John Dryden, and the better Restoration comedies. The faith of Bunyan, the 
philosophy of John Locke, and the mathematics and optics of Sir Isaac Newton had 
more lasting cultural impact than any literary work of the period in verse, prose, or 
drama. An exception can be made for Dryden’s 
Absolom and Achitophel 
(1681), the 
model for a century of couplet satire. In a period of recurrent public crisis, writing was 
topical, allusive and factional, and the theatre was taken up with current affairs, 
political, ecclesiastical, and sexual. The newspaper and the novel were at hand. 
The ‘heroic’ tragedy of the Restoration has not lasted well, but its comedy is often 
staged today. It was the source of the comedy-of-manners tradition in English writing: 
Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Jane Austen, W. S. Gilbert, Oscar 
Wilde and much since. Dryden was the leading poet of the period, excelling in all its 
forms, especially satire and translation. He also wrote the best critical prose of an age 
in which prose moved towards conversation. If the Restoration period produced no 
writer of the first rank, it gave secular literature new importance. It is notable that 
Charles II’s tolerance extended to the great writer who was the public apologist for his 
father’s execution. Milton’s absoluteness was recognized rather than welcome in an 
age of compromise and crisis management. After a sunset of ‘heroic’ gestures, poetry 
subsided into the verse of the smooth sons of the ‘Sons’ of Ben Jonson: Suckling, 
Denham and Waller. The civil, secular, social culture of the Restoration period is often 
called Augustan: its writers saw parallels between the restored monarchy and the peace 
restored by the Emperor Augustus after civil war and the assassination of Caesar had 
ended the Roman republic. Charles I was no Caesar and Charles II no Augustus, but 
he was ‘civilized’: he shared his cousin Louis XIV’s esteem for 
les beaux arts et les 
belles lettres. 
He patronized the Royal Society, the theatre, and actresses. The English 


KHILOLA RAKHIMOVA, senior teacher, URSU 

Augustans prized peace and order - and envied the prestige, patronage and polish of 
the first Augustans. Augustanism ruled from Dryden’s maturity in the 1680s until the 
death of Alexander Pope in 1744, but its ideals guided Dr Johnson (d.1784), and 
schooled Jane Austen (1775-1817). Literary history sometimes includes the 
Restoration in the 18
th
century, for ‘eighteenth-century’ qualities can be found in 
literature from 1660 to 1798, the publication date of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 
Lyrical Ballads. 
Augustan verse was typically in the rhymed pentameter couplet, as for example 
in Pope’s epigram: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, 
Let Newton 
be! 
and all was light. The ‘heroic couplet’, so called from its use in Restoration heroic 
tragedy, was less about ancient virtue than about its modern absence. This example 
typically recalls a higher text, the creation of light in Genesis. The theoretical prestige 
of ‘the heroic poem’ was maintained by criticism, as in Joseph Addison’s appreciation 
of 
Paradise Lost 
in 
The Spectator 
in 1712. Another homage to the heroic was 
translation. Dryden’s 
Aeneid 
(1697) and Pope’s 
Iliad 
(1720) echo Milton, but they 
moderate and modernize their exemplars. These heroic frames put into perspective the 
tameness of everyday life; which was also explored less critically in prose. 
The Restoration consensus was an agreement to disagree. Charles II managed to 
govern without parliament and rode out his troubles, but James II rekindled old 
conflicts and in 1688 was forced out. An Act of 1662 had re-established Anglican 
Uniformity, banishing to the nonconformist wings both Catholics and the dissenting 
heirs of the Puritans. 
The Restoration is an unusual historical period, as its literature is bounded by a 
specific political event: the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. It is unusual in another 
way, as well, for it is a time when the influence of that king's presence and personality 
permeated literary society to such an extent that, almost uniquely, literature reflects the 
court. The adversaries of the restoration, the Puritans and democrats and republicans, 
similarly respond to the peculiarities of the king and the king's personality. Therefore, 
a top-down view of the literary history of the Restoration has more validity than that of 
most literary epochs. "The Restoration" as a critical concept covers the duration of the 
effect of Charles and Charles's manner. This effect extended beyond his death, in some 
instances, and not as long as his life, in others. 
The Restoration was an age of poetry. Not only was poetry the most popular form 
of literature, but it was also the most significant form of literature, as poems affected 
political events and immediately reflected the times. It was, to its own people, an age 
dominated only by the king, and not by any single genius. Throughout the period, the 
lyric, ariel, historical, and epic poem was being developed. Although it is impossible to 
satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English, long fiction and fictional 
biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the 


KHILOLA RAKHIMOVA, senior teacher, URSU 

Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was 
popular in England. Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso engendered prose narratives 
of love, peril, and revenge, and Gauthier de Costes, seigneur de la Calprenède's novels 
were quite popular during the Interregnum and beyond. 
The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with 
reading "novels" as a vice. Inasmuch as these novels were largely read in French or in 
translation from French, they were associated with effeminacy. However, novels slowly 
divested themselves of the Arthurian and chivalric trappings and came to centre on more 
ordinary or picaresque figures. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the 
novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. 

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