Sic incipio

I am not a Restorationist; I am too young, callow, and frivolous to be an -ist of any sort. I am merely a college senior with a healthy crush on the English Restoration, the span of time between Charles II's coronation in 1660 and his death in 1685. (For the benefit of faulty memories everywhere, Charles was kind enough to live and die in multiples of five.) After a decade of civil war, and another of Puritan rule (Cromwell closed the theaters and banned Christmas), England saw a cultural explosion: plays, poems, periwigs, perversion. Public morality relaxed. Women acted on the stage for the first time. Courtiers danced naked in gardens. Scientists like Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren founded the Royal Society (though they kept their clothes on). And Samuel Pepys wrote it all down.

The 1660s were a bit like the 1960s (hence my nod to The Who), and the Restoration produced the same cultural backlash: by 1700, it was no longer fashionable to smash windows and write poems about impotence. The aging rake, like the aging hippie three centuries later, became a common trope in fiction: feeble and syphilitic, nostalgic for the debauches of his youth. Restoration literature fared even worse at the hands of the Victorians, and suffered from scholastic prudery well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1920s, the editors of Etherege and Wycherley hinted that these dramatists had longed to write about daisies and rainbows, but alas! fashion had compelled them to be lewd.

Tastes have changed since then, but Restoration literature was so underrated for so many decades that almost no one reads it today. The average English major will be lucky to encounter one Restoration comedy in four years. In the unlikely event that she takes the GRE Lit, she'll have to memorize a few dull catchphrases: "war between the sexes," "comedy of manners," "social mobility." This can't go on.

But why should I care? you ask. My job is to give you an answer.

So what can you expect from this blog? I'd class my offerings under the humble label of stuff: poems, epigrams, letters, images, scraps of plays, self-indulgent screeds. It might be fun. We'll see.