 Theatres were closed during the Puritan Age.

e. During the Restoration Age, they re-opened with new types of plays
and performances which were different than the before.
 The theatres which were indoor were much smaller than the Elizabethan theatres. They didn’t have a platform,
but there was a picture frame stage with different sceneries. The lighting was artificial and the actors would enter
from the side.
 The audience was of middle class and upper-class people. Most of the features of Restoration Drama are seen
even today.
 The success of the plays of the Restoration period was dependent upon the strange staging devices, weird plots,
and dramatized language.
 Attention was increased to the commercial rather than artistic aspect of making theatre.
 Earlier Elizabethan texts like King Lear were given a happy ending.
 Horse-shoe shape was given to the theatres with an inclined stage; thus allowing more people to enjoy drama.

Bourgeois tragedy (German: Bürgerliches Trauerspiel) is a form that developed in 18th-century

Europe. It was a fruit of the Enlightenmentand the emergence of the bourgeois class and its
ideals. It is characterised by the fact that its protagonists are ordinary citizens. The first true
bourgeois tragedy was an English play, George Lillo's The London Merchant; or, the History of
George Barnwell, which was first performed in 1731. Usually, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's
play Miss Sara Sampson, which was first produced in 1755, is said to be the
earliest Bürgerliches Trauerspiel in Germany.

For much of the 17th century, Pierre Corneille, who made his mark on the world of tragedy with
plays like Medée (1635) and Le Cid (1636), was the most successful writer of French tragedies.
Corneille's tragedies were strangely un-tragic (his first version of Le Cid was even listed as a
tragicomedy), for they had happy endings. In his theoretical works on theatre, Corneille
redefined both comedy and tragedy around the following suppositions:
 The stage—in both comedy and tragedy—should feature noble characters (this would eliminate
many low-characters, typical of the farce, from Corneille's comedies). Noble characters should not
be depicted as vile (reprehensible actions are generally due to non-noble characters in Corneille's
plays).
 Tragedy deals with affairs of the state (wars, dynastic marriages); comedy deals with love. For a
work to be tragic, it need not have a tragic ending.
 Although Aristotle says that catharsis (purgation of emotion) should be the goal of tragedy, this is
only an ideal. In conformity with the moral codes of the period, plays should not show evil being
rewarded or nobility being degraded.

Corneille continued to write plays through 1674 (mainly tragedies, but also something he called
"heroic comedies") and many continued to be successes, although the "irregularities" of his
theatrical methods were increasingly criticised (notably by François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac)
and the success of Jean Racine from the late 1660s signalled the end of his preeminence.
Jean Racine's tragedies—inspired by Greek myths, Euripides, Sophocles and Seneca—condensed
their plot into a tight set of passionate and duty-bound conflicts between a small group of noble
characters, and concentrated on these characters' double-binds and the geometry of their
unfulfilled desires and hatreds. Racine's poetic skill was in the representation of pathos and
amorous passion (like Phèdre's love for her stepson) and his impact was such that emotional
crisis would be the dominant mode of tragedy to the end of the century. Racine's two late plays
("Esther" and "Athalie") opened new doors to biblical subject matter and to the use of theatre in
the education of young women. Racine also faced criticism for his irregularities: when his
play, Bérénice, was criticised for not containing any deaths, Racine disputed the conventional
view of tragedy.

What, then is a Comic Epic in Prose?

Thus a comic epic in prose chiefly promises a variety
of characters involved in a very comprehensive action. The
novelist’s tone is light, even frivolous, and he gives mildly
satirical, ironical exposition of the ridiculous. It is epical in scale
and it is concerns the ridiculous in human life. It is not romance
since it is highly, down-to earth realistic. It is not history for it is
not a superficial study of events, nor is it not history for it is not a
superficial study of events, nor is it a burlesque, for a burlesque
distorts while it does not. Behind the frivolous tone of the
novelist, there is a strict moral responsibility which he shares
with the writers of the serious epics. What Fielding was
attempting was an entirely new species of literature in his
language. And he was right to claim;
“This kind of writing I do not remember to have seen
hither to attempted in our language.”

Middle Comedy, style of drama that prevailed in Athens from about 400 BC to
about 320 BC. Preoccupied with social themes, Middle Comedy represents a
transition from Old Comedy, which presented literary, political, and
philosophical commentary interspersed with scurrilous personal invective,
to New Comedy, with its gently satiric observation of contemporary domestic
life. Aristophanes’ last play, the Plutus, is an extant work that reflects this
transition. Antiphanes and Alexis were preeminent Middle Comedy dramatists,
but none of their plays has survived except in later quotations of individual
words or sentences.