The drama of sensibility Author:Ernest Bernbaum Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE INHIBITION OF SENTIMENTALISM FROM PLAYS OF DOMESTIC LIFE: 1660-1695 Many tragedies and comedies by Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare, and J... more »onson, became stock plays after the Restoration, in either their original or an adapted form; and the sources of new plays were often Elizabethan. One might reasonably expect that between 1660 and 1695 a considerable portion of the Elizabethan domestic plays with sentimental tendencies would have been revived, remodelled, or used as sources. Of the seventeen comedies discussed in the previous chapter, however, twelve seem not to have thus reappeared during this period.1 Two of the remaining five comedies were in their original form only slightly pathetic, and did not in their transformation become more so. Monsieur Thomas passed into D'Urfey's Trick for Trick (1678), with a suppression of the serious passages between Valentine and Francis. Eastward Hoe! became the source of Tate's Cuckold's Haven (1685), but the affectionate Touchstone did not remain a sympathetic figure. Cowley's The Guardian reappeared as The Cutter of Cole- man Street (1661) at the very beginning of the Restoration. The serious passages, brief in The Guardian, were shortened in The Cutter, which, after 1661, was laid aside for over forty years. Shirley's The Example was performed at some timebetween 1663 and 1682. Here again the serious passages were not very conspicuous, nor does the play seem to have been performed in more than one season. It can hardly be maintained that either of these revivals was significant. 1 Cf. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708), and John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage (1832), I and II. The lists given in these works are, of course, not complete. The plays under discussion were recovered from oblivion i...« less