Four Restoration Marriage Plays The Soldier's Fortune; the Princess of Cleves; Amphitryon; or the Two Sosias; the Wives' Excuse; or Cuckolds Make Themselves |
|
| Author:
| Otway, Thomas
Lee, Nathaniel
Dryden, John
Southerne, Thomas |
| Editor:
| Cordner, Michael |
| As told to:
| Clayton, Ronald |
| Series title: | Oxford World's Classics Ser. |
| ISBN: | 978-0-19-282570-4 |
| Publication Date: | Jun 1995 |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press, Incorporated
|
| Book Format: | Paperback |
| List Price: | AUD $16.95 |
Book Description:
|
Marriage and its discontents lie at the heart of Restoration comedy. In all four of the great plays gathered here, a married woman confronts her would-be seducer. Each dramatist, however, totally reinterprets the situation. Thomas Otway's The Soldier's Fortune converts adultery into political revenge. Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleves offers a potent and perplexing portrait of a libertine in action at the sixteenth-century French court. John Dryden's Amphitryon, set in ancient...
More DescriptionMarriage and its discontents lie at the heart of Restoration comedy. In all four of the great plays gathered here, a married woman confronts her would-be seducer. Each dramatist, however, totally reinterprets the situation. Thomas Otway's The Soldier's Fortune converts adultery into political revenge. Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleves offers a potent and perplexing portrait of a libertine in action at the sixteenth-century French court. John Dryden's Amphitryon, set in ancient Thebes, retells the story in which Jupiter lures the virtuous Alcmena into cuckolding her husband by a stratagem that throws into doubt the very nature of human identity. Thomas Southerne's The Wives' Excuse reinvents, for the new circumstances of the 1690s, the familiar Restoration plot of a wife spurred towards infidelity by her partner's failings. All of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation.