Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: Restoration Comedies, language: English, abstract: Two Restoration Comedies that I want to discuss are William Wycherley’s The CountryWife (1675) and William ...

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: Restoration Comedies, language: English, abstract: Two Restoration Comedies that I want to discuss are William Wycherley’s The CountryWife (1675) and William Congreve’s Love for Love (1695). Both plays were written in a timewhen libertinism prevailed and male stereotypes like rakes and fops and female stereotypeslike wives and virgins were popular. Needless to say, both plays not only deal withRestoration society but also with its problems, concerns, and difficulties at the time. Andespecially, Love for Love, which was written fairly at the end of the Restoration era, still is aconventional play in terms of being libertine-satirical but it already includes some features ofsentimentalism. So it is not a postponement from libertinism to sentimentalism yet, but I wantto argue in this essay that both plays are rather conventional libertine Restoration plays whichinclude features of early sentimentalism.