Tragedy and Varieties of Serious Drama

Abstract

To understand Restoration tragedy, one must first understand what the playwrights and audiences meant by the term as well as the many diverse influences that shaped the serious drama of the later seventeenth century. The first decades of serious drama after the Restoration were characterized by visual and verbal grandeur. By the end of the 1670s, playwrights and their audiences began to question the certainties of heroic action, and, as drama became darker in tone, the grand spectacles of the early Restoration evolved into scenes of horror and destruction. Instead of horror, the tragedy of the 1680s emphasized pathos and perhaps most notably shifted its emphasis from the hero to heroine, usually a virtuous woman beleaguered and overwhelmed by sorrows. The movement towards woman-centred drama can be seen not only as the first step towards domestic drama, but as the most distinctive development in the tragedy of the later Restoration.

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