THE RESTORATION AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 1660-1785

• The Restoration period begins in 1660, the year in which King Charles II (the exiled Stuart king) was restored to the English throne.
• England, Scotland, and Wales were united as Great Britain by the 1707 Act of Union.
• The period is one of increasing commercial prosperity and global trade for Britain.
• Literacy expanded to include the middle classes and even some of the poor.
• Emerging social ideas included politeness―a behavioral standard to which anyone might aspire―and new rhetoric of liberty and rights, sentiment and sympathy.

CONDITIONS OF LITERARY PRODUCTION

• The Stage Licensing Act (1737) established a form of dramatic censorship in which the Lord Chamberlain pre-approved and licensed all plays for performance in London.
• Censorship of other print material changed radically with the 1710 Statute of Anne, the first British copyright law not tied to government approval of a book's contents.
• Copyrights were typically held by booksellers.
• The term "public sphere" refers to the material texts concerning matters of national interest and also to the public venues (including coffeehouses, clubs, taverns, parks, etc.) where readers circulated and discussed these texts.
• Thanks to greatly increased literacy rates (by 1800, 60-70 percent of adult men could read, versus 25 percent in 1600), the eighteenth century was the first to sustain a large number of professional authors. Genteel writers could benefit from both patronage and the subscription system; "Grub Street" hacks at the lower end of the profession were employed on a piecework basis.
• Women published widely.
• Reading material, though it remained unaffordable to the laboring classes, was frequently shared. Circulating libraries began in the 1740s.
• Capital letters began to be used only at the beginnings of sentences and for proper names, and the use of italics was reduced.

RESTORATION LITERATURE, 1600-1700

• Dryden was the most influential writer of the Restoration, for he wrote in every form important to the period―occasional verse, comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, odes, satires, translations of classical works—and produced influential critical essays concerning how one ought to write these forms.
• Restoration prose style grew more like witty, urbane conversation and less like the intricate, rhetorical style of previous writers like John Milton and John Donne.
• Simultaneously, Restoration literature continued to appeal to heroic ideals of love and honor, particularly on stage, in heroic tragedy.
• The other major dramatic genre was the Restoration comedy of manners, which emphasizes sexual intrigue and satirizes the elite's social behavior with witty dialogue.