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استمارة تقييم الرسائل البحثية ملقرر دراس ي اوﻻ : بيانات تمل بمعرفة الطالب اسم الطالب : طه ابراهيم سيد ابراهيم كلية : اﻻداب الفرقة/املستوى : الثالثة الشعبة : اللغه اﻻنجليزيه اسم املقرر : دراما كود املقرر: 325/ج. ز استاذ املقرر : ماجدة مفتاح البريد اﻻلكترونى للطالب : [email protected] عنوان الرسالة البحثية : restoration age and comedy of manners ثانيا: بيانات تمل بمعرفة لجنة املمتحنيين هل الرسالة البحثية املقدمة متشا بة جزئيا او كليا ☐ نعم ☐ ﻻ فى حالة اﻻجابة بنعم ﻻ يتم تقييم املشروع البحثى ويعتبر غير مجاز تقييم املشروع البحثى م عناصر التقييم الوزن التقييم النسبى 1 الشكل العام للرسالة البحثية 2 تحقق املتطلبات العلمية املطلوبة 3 يذكر املراجع واملصادر العلمية 4 الصياغة اللغوية واسلوب الكتابة جيد نتيجة التقييم النهائى /100 ☐ ناجح ☐ راسب توقيع لجنة التقييم 1. .2 .3 .4 .5 ترفق هذه اﻻستمارة كغﻻف للمشروع البحثى بعد استكمال البيانان بمعرفة الطالب وعلى ان ﻻ تزيد عن صفحة واحدة "Restoration comedy" is English comedy written and performed in the Restoration period from 1660 to 1710. Comedy of manners is used as a synonym of Restoration comedy.[1] After public stage performances had been banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, the re-opening of the theatres in 1660 signalled a renaissance of English drama.[2] Sexually explicit language was encouraged by King Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian George Norman Clark argues: The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper....The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.[3] The socially diverse audiences included both aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on, and a substantial middle-class segment. These playgoers were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, by crowded and bustling plots, by the introduction of the first professional actresses, and by the rise of the first celebrity actors. This period saw the first professional female playwright, Aphra Behn. Theatre companies Charles II was an active and interested patron of the drama. Soon after his restoration, in 1660, he granted exclusive play-staging rights, so-called Royal patents, to the King's Company and the Duke's Company, led by two middle- aged Caroline playwrights, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant. The patentees scrambled for performance rights to the previous generation's Jacobean and Caroline plays, which were the first necessity for economic survival before any new plays existed. Their next priority was to build new, splendid patent theatres in Drury Lane and Dorset Gardens, respectively. Striving to outdo each other in magnificence, Killigrew and Davenant ended up with quite similar theatres, both designed by Christopher Wren, both optimally provided for music and dancing, and both fitted with moveable scenery and elaborate machines for thunder, lightning, and waves.[4] The dramatists of the Restoration renounced the tradition of satire, as recently embodied by Ben Jonson, and devoted themselves to the comedy of manners, which uncritically accepted the social code of the upper class.[5] The audience of the early Restoration period was not exclusively courtly, as has sometimes been supposed, but it was quite small and could barely support two companies. There was no untapped reserve of occasional playgoers. Ten consecutive performances constituted a smash hit. This closed system forced playwrights to be extremely responsive to popular taste. Fashions in the drama would change almost week by week rather than season by season, as each company responded to the offerings of the other, and new plays were urgently sought. The King's Company and the Duke's Company vied with one another for audience favour, for popular actors, and for new plays, and in this hectic climate the new genres of heroic drama, pathetic drama, and Restoration comedy were born and flourished.[6] United Company, 1682–1695[edit] Both the quantity and quality of the drama suffered when in 1682 the more successful Duke's Company absorbed the struggling King's Company, and the amalgamated United Company was formed. The production of new plays dropped off sharply in the 1680s, affected by both the monopoly and the political situation (see Decline of comedy below). The influence and the incomes of the actors dropped, too.[7] In the late 80s, predatory investors ("Adventurers") converged on the United Company, while management was taken over by the lawyer Christopher Rich. Rich attempted to finance a tangle of "farmed" shares and sleeping partners by slashing salaries and, dangerously, by abolishing the traditional perks of senior performers, who were stars with the clout to fight back.[8] War of the theatres, 1695–1700[edit] The company owners, wrote the young United Company employee Colley Cibber, "who had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presum'd they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people, did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public were inclined to support."[9] Performers like the legendary Thomas Betterton, the tragedienne Elizabeth Barry, and the rising young comedian Anne Bracegirdle had the audience on their side and, in the confidence of this, they walked out.[10] The actors gained a Royal "licence to perform", thus bypassing Rich's ownership of both the original Duke's and King's Company patents from 1660, and formed their own cooperative company. This unique venture was set up with detailed rules for avoiding arbitrary managerial authority, regulating the ten actors' shares, the conditions of salaried employees, and the sickness and retirement benefits of both categories. The cooperative had the good luck to open in 1695 with the première of William Congreve's famous Love For Love and the skill to make it a huge box- office success.[11] London again had two competing companies. Their dash to attract audiences briefly revitalised Restoration drama, but also set it on a fatal downhill slope to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Rich's company notoriously offered Bartholomew Fair-type attractions – high kickers, jugglers, ropedancers, performing animals – while the co-operating actors, even as they appealed to snobbery by setting themselves up as the only legitimate theatre company in London, were not above retaliating with "prologues recited by boys of five, and epilogues declaimed by ladies on horseback".[12] First actresses Restoration comedy was strongly influenced by the introduction of the first professional actresses. Before the closing of the theatres, all female roles had been taken by boy players, and the predominantly male audiences of the 1660s and 1670s were curious, censorious, and delighted at the novelty of seeing real women engage in risqué repartee and take part in physical seduction scenes. Samuel Pepys refers many times in his famous diary to visiting the playhouse to watch or re-watch the performance of particular actresses, and to how much he enjoys these experiences. Daringly suggestive comedy scenes involving women became especially common, although of course Restoration actresses were, just like male actors, expected to do justice to all kinds and moods of plays. (Their role in the development of Restoration tragedy is also important, compare She-tragedy.) First celebrity actors During the Restoration period, both male and female actors on the London stage became for the first time public personalities and celebrities. Documents of the period show audiences being attracted to performances by the talents of particular actors as much as by particular plays, and more than by authors (who seem to have been the least important draw, no performance being advertised by author until 1699). Although the playhouses were built for large audiences—the second Drury Lane theatre from 1674 held 2000 patrons – they were of compact design, and an actor's charisma could be intimately projected from the thrust stage. With two companies competing for their services from 1660 to 1682, star actors were able to negotiate star deals, comprising company shares and benefit nights as well as salaries. This advantageous situation changed when the two companies were amalgamated in 1682, but the way the actors rebelled and took command of a new company in 1695 is in itself an illustration of how far their status and power had developed since 1660. The greatest fixed stars among Restoration actors were Elizabeth Barry ("Famous Mrs Barry" who "forc 'd Tears from the Eyes of her Auditory") and Thomas Betterton, both of them active in organising the actors' revolt in 1695 and both original patent- holders in the resulting actors' cooperative. Betterton played every great male part there was from 1660 into the 18th century. After watching Hamlet in 1661, Samuel Pepys reports in his diary that the young beginner Betterton "did the prince's part beyond imagination." Betterton's expressive performances seem to have attracted playgoers as magnetically as did the novelty of seeing women on the stage. He was soon established as the leading man of the Duke's Company, and played Dorimant, the seminal irresistible Restoration rake, at the première of George Etherege's Man of Mode (1676). Betterton's position remained unassailable through the 1680s, both as the leading man of the United Company and as its stage manager and de facto day-to-day leader. He remained loyal to Rich longer than many of his co-workers, but eventually it was he who headed the actors' walkout in 1695, and who became the acting manager of the new company.

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