Everything about The Comedy Of Manners totally explained
The
comedy of manners satirizes the manners and affectations of a
social class, often represented by
stock characters, such as the
miles gloriosus in ancient times, the
fop and the
rake during the
Restoration, or an old person pretending to be young. The plot of the comedy, often concerned with an illicit love affair or some other scandal, is generally less important than its witty and often bawdy dialogue.
The comedy of manners was first developed in the
new comedy of the
Ancient Greek playwright
Menander. His style, elaborate plots, and stock characters were imitated by the
Roman playwrights
Plautus and
Terence, whose comedies were widely known and copied during the
Renaissance. The best-known comedies of manners, however, may well be those of the
French playwright
Molière, who satirized the hypocrisy and pretension of the
ancien régime in such plays as (
The School for Wives,
1662),
Le Misanthrope (
The Misanthrope,
1666), and most famously
Tartuffe (
1664).
English drama
In
England,
William Shakespeare's
Much Ado about Nothing might be considered the first comedy of manners, but the genre really flourished during the
Restoration period.
Restoration comedy, which was influenced by
Ben Jonson's
comedy of humours, made fun of affected wit and acquired follies of the time. The masterpieces of the genre were the plays of
William Wycherley (
The Country Wife,
1675) and
William Congreve (
The Way of the World,
1700). In the late
18th century Oliver Goldsmith (
She Stoops to Conquer,
1773) and
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (
The Rivals,
1775;
The School for Scandal,
1777) revived the form.
The tradition of elaborate, artificial plotting and epigrammatic dialogue was carried on by the Irish playwright
Oscar Wilde in
Lady Windermere's Fan (
1892) and
The Importance of Being Earnest (
1895). In the
20th century, the comedy of manners reappeared in the plays of the British dramatists
Noel Coward (
Hay Fever,
1925) and
Somerset Maugham and the novels of
P.G. Wodehouse, as well as various
British sitcoms. The
Carry On films are a direct descendant of the comedy of manners style. Television programs such as
The Young Ones,
Seinfeld,
Absolutely Fabulous and
The Royle Family and the
novelists like
Connie Willis have brought the comedy of manners to the modern era.
Twentieth-century examples
The term
comedy of menace, which British drama critic
Irving Wardle based on the subtitle of (1958), by
David Campton, is a play-on-words derived from the "comedy of manners" (
menace being
manners said with somewhat of a Judeo-English accent). Pinter's play
The Homecoming has been described as a mid-twentieth-century "comedy of manners".
[
In Boston Marriage (1999), David Mamet chronicles a sexual relationship between two women, one of whom has her eye on yet another young woman (who never appears, but who is the target of a seduction scheme). Periodically, the two women make their serving woman the butt of haughty jokes, serving to point up the satire on class. Though displaying the verbal dexterity one associates with both the playwright and the genre, the play marks an important change in that the patina of wit occasionally erupts into shocking crudity the likes of which would, of course, have been much more hinted at than explicitly stated in the plays of earlier centuries.]
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