Commonwealth & Restoration2 Marks Questions with Answers · Authors & Works · 15 MCQs · Chronology Drill

With the theatres closed by Parliament (1642) and the king executed (1649), literature under Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth turned to prose of controversy: Milton's political and religious pamphlets, including Areopagitica (1644), and Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), the great treatise of political philosophy. Drama survived only in private and 'musical entertainments' until 1660.

Areopagitica (1644) is Milton's prose oration against Parliament's licensing order — the greatest defence of the freedom of the press in English. Its title invokes the Areopagus of Athens, and its most quoted sentence declares: 'as good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature… but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.'

Paradise Lost — published in ten books in 1667 (sold for £10), rearranged into twelve in 1674 — is Milton's blank-verse epic of the Fall of Man, undertaken to 'justify the ways of God to men'. Composed after he was completely blind, by dictation, it gives English its grandest verse and its most debated character, Satan ('Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven').

Both appeared in one volume in 1671. Paradise Regained is the 'brief epic' in four books on Christ's temptation in the wilderness. Samson Agonistes is a closet tragedy on the Greek model — observing the unities, with a chorus — on the blind Samson among the Philistines, closing with the famous 'calm of mind, all passion spent'. Its parallel with the blind Milton is irresistible and always examined.

Charles II licensed exactly two theatre companies — Thomas Killigrew's King's Company and William Davenant's Duke's Company — creating the 'patent theatre' monopoly. For the first time on the English public stage, women's roles were played by actresses (Nell Gwyn the most famous), and the new indoor theatres used movable painted scenery.

The comedy of manners satirises the sexual intrigues and verbal fencing of fashionable London society — rakes, fops, jealous husbands and witty heroines. Its masters are Etherege (The Man of Mode, 1676), Wycherley (The Country Wife, 1675) and above all Congreve, whose The Way of the World (1700), with the courtship of Mirabell and Millamant and their famous 'proviso scene', is the form's masterpiece.

Heroic drama (heroic play) was the Restoration's serious genre: epic conflicts of love versus honour, declaimed in rhymed heroic couplets — Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1670–71) is the type-specimen. The genre's bombast was so mercilessly parodied in Buckingham's burlesque The Rehearsal (1671), with its playwright 'Mr Bayes' (= Dryden), that it never fully recovered.

Absalom and Achitophel (1681) is Dryden's verse satire in heroic couplets on the Exclusion Crisis, told as the biblical story of David: Charles II is David, his illegitimate son Monmouth is Absalom, and the scheming Earl of Shaftesbury is Achitophel. It is the greatest political satire in English, balancing portrait-assassination (Zimri = Buckingham) with royalist argument.

Mac Flecknoe (written c. 1678, published 1682) is Dryden's mock-epic crowning his rival Thomas Shadwell heir to the throne of Dulness, under the dying monarch Richard Flecknoe: 'the rest to some faint meaning make pretence, / But Shadwell never deviates into sense.' It is the direct model for Pope's Dunciad.

Dr Johnson gave Dryden the title for the Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) — a dialogue among four speakers (Neander voicing Dryden) comparing ancient, French and English drama, and vindicating Shakespeare and English tragicomedy. With his critical prefaces, it founded practical criticism in English; Johnson also called him the man who 'found English of brick and left it marble'.

The Pilgrim's Progress (Part I, 1678; Part II, 1684), begun by John Bunyan in Bedford jail, is the supreme prose allegory in English: Christian's journey from the City of Destruction through the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair (whence Thackeray's title) to the Celestial City. After the Bible, it was long the most widely read and translated book in English.

Samuel Pepys kept his diary in shorthand from 1660 to 1669 — the candid private record of the age, including the Plague (1665) and the Great Fire of London (1666), unpublished until 1825. John Evelyn's longer, more decorous diary complements it. Together they founded the diary as an English literary form.

In 1698 the clergyman Jeremy Collier published A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, attacking Restoration comedy's licentiousness by name — Congreve and Vanbrugh replied, weakly. The pamphlet crystallised changing public taste; comedy turned 'sentimental' within a decade, and the great age of the comedy of manners ended.

All for Love, or The World Well Lost (1677) is Dryden's blank-verse tragedy on Antony and Cleopatra, 'written in imitation of Shakespeare's style' — his open abandonment of the rhymed heroic play. Unlike Shakespeare's sprawling original, it observes the three unities, making the two plays the classic exam comparison of Elizabethan freedom versus neoclassical regularity.

Lycidas (1637) is Milton's pastoral elegy on the drowning of his Cambridge friend Edward King, written in irregular rhymed verse. It moves through pastoral convention — the shepherd mourning a fellow shepherd — with a fierce digression attacking corrupt clergy ('the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed') before ending in consolation and resurrection. It is the greatest pastoral elegy in English before Shelley's Adonais and a standard pairing with it in exam questions on the tradition.

Comus (A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634) is Milton's masque — an aristocratic entertainment staged for the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales. A Lady separated from her brothers is imprisoned by the enchanter Comus; the Attendant Spirit (as the shepherd Thyrsis) and the river nymph Sabrina rescue her. More philosophically serious than any earlier masque, it presents chastity as an active spiritual power — the longest and most ambitious masque in English.

Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes is the founding text of modern political philosophy: in the 'state of nature' without government, life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'; to escape this, men make a social contract surrendering their freedom to a sovereign — the Leviathan of the title, from the sea-monster of Job. Written in exile with the Royalists, it influenced both sides of the constitutional debate and shaped every political thinker from Locke to Rousseau.

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was the first professional woman writer in English — she supported herself entirely by writing plays, fiction and poetry. The Rover (1677) is a boisterous comedy of exiled Cavaliers in Naples; Oroonoko (1688), on a noble African prince enslaved in Surinam, is the ancestor of the abolitionist novel and the first important prose fiction by a woman in English. Virginia Woolf wrote that 'all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn.'

The Royal Society (founded 1660, chartered 1662 — 'for the improvement of natural knowledge') promoted Thomas Sprat's ideal of prose as 'so many things in so many words': mathematical plainness, concrete nouns, short sentences, no ornament. Its influence shifted literary prose away from the elaborate metaphorical styles of the earlier century toward the clarity that would define Augustan writing — Addison, Steele, Swift and Defoe are its literary heirs.

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), was the quintessential Restoration rake: court wit, scandalous libertine and the finest lyric poet of the age. His 'A Satire Against Reason and Mankind' (1679) attacks human reason itself in favour of animal instinct — an inversion of Augustan values. He died at thirty-three and repented on his deathbed, a conversion that was itself widely publicised.

Hudibras (three parts, 1663–78) is Samuel Butler's mock-heroic satire on Puritanism: the Presbyterian knight Sir Hudibras and his sectarian squire Ralpho blunder through comic adventures in the manner of Don Quixote, their pompous religiosity punctured at every turn. Its rollicking octosyllabic couplets and extravagant feminine rhymes gave English the term 'Hudibrasic' for comic doggerel. Charles II reputedly carried a copy in his pocket.

Sir George Etherege (c. 1636–1692) established the comedy of manners with She Would If She Could (1668), but The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) is his masterpiece. Its hero Dorimant — brilliant, heartless, irresistible, modelled on Rochester — is the archetype of the Restoration rake; Sir Fopling Flutter, the oblivious fop who thinks he sets fashion, is the first great fop in English comedy. Dryden called the play 'the best comedy of the age'.

The Exclusion Crisis (1678–81) was the constitutional struggle over whether Charles II's Catholic brother James, Duke of York, should be excluded from the succession. Shaftesbury's 'Whig' faction supported exclusion; the 'Tories' backed hereditary right. The crisis gave England its two-party vocabulary ('Whig' and 'Tory') and is the direct political context of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and Mac Flecknoe.

In 1688 a Parliamentary invitation brought William of Orange and his wife Mary — Protestant daughter of James II — to England; James II fled to France without a battle, the 'bloodless' revolution. The Bill of Rights (1689) settled constitutional monarchy, established Parliamentary sovereignty and secured Protestant succession. For literature, it stabilised the conditions — growing press freedom, a prosperous middle class, coffee-house culture — that produced Augustan writing.

Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) bridged the Restoration and the 18th century: The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger (1696) — a sharp sequel to Cibber's sentimental Love's Last Shift, restoring the reformed rake to his vices — and The Provoked Wife (1697) are his comic masterpieces. Vanbrugh was also a great Baroque architect (Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard). His plays were among Jeremy Collier's targets in A Short View (1698).

John Locke (1632–1704) is the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution. Two Treatises of Government (1689) argued that political authority rests on consent and that rebellion against tyranny is justified — the theoretical grounding for 1688. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) proposed the mind as a blank slate (tabula rasa) at birth, all ideas coming from experience. Locke's empiricism and political liberalism were the intellectual foundations on which the Augustan age built.

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. In the prefatory note added to the 1668 edition of Paradise Lost, Milton defended it against critics as 'more heroic' than rhyme, which he called 'the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients' — meaning Homer and Virgil. His verse paragraphs, inverted Latin syntax and grand similes set the standard for English epic blank verse and were the direct formal model for Keats, Tennyson and Wordsworth's Prelude.

Sentimental comedy — virtuous middle-class characters weeping and being morally rewarded — was the reaction against the amoral wit of Restoration comedy after Collier's attack. Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift (1696), in which a rake is reformed by his wife's patient virtue, is the first example; Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) is its masterpiece. Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Sheridan's The School for Scandal (1777) are partly reactions against its excesses — making the four plays a standard chronological exam sequence.