The Diverse Topography of Restoration Comedy

The choice of setting is an important element in dramatic works, one that is often aligned with the definition of character or genre. Restoration comedy has traditionally been associated with London settings, particularly with the fashionable new areas of court and town, frequented by the higher classes: St James's Park, the Mulberry Garden, the Mall, or Covent Garden. Such an assumption, however, rests largely on a view of the comic production of Restoration England which used to foreground the work of a small group of canonical playwrights like Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. To revise this notion, the kind of quantitative analysis facilitated by the cataloguing work of the Restoration Comedy Project can prove very useful. This article discusses the difficulties faced in the process of determining the scene of the plays and builds on the data already collected for the period 1660–1682 to trace the topography of Restoration comedy. A review of this information yields a more diverse landscape than is usually taken for granted. Only half of the plays are set in London and barely half of those lay scenes in the genteel areas of the town. Moreover, an examination of the Covent Garden comedies shows that, after the Great Fire, this district is not represented as the exclusive preserve of the gentry, but as the home of a substantial number of citizen characters too.