The Comedy of Manners from Sheridan to Maugham / / Newell W. Sawyer.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn eBook Package Archive 1898-1999 (pre Pub)
• VerfasserIn: Sawyer, Newell W.,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2016]; ©1931
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Edition: Reprint 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (276 p.)

In the two centuries between the first performance of The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the outbreak of the First World War, the stage provided an accurate mirror of the changing mores of English society. "High comedy," Newell W. Sawyer writes, "views man as a social animal in the midst of his fellows, with customs, conventions, and traditions of his own devising, and prods him gently or mockingly, as he stands confounded by that which he has made." The comedy of manners became, from its prototype, a dramatic category reflecting the life, thought, and manners of upper-class society, faithful to its traditions and philosophy, and as such offers an ideal medium for such a study as Professor Sawyer has here undertaken. The result is a book that is at once entertaining and serious, a study of two centuries of the British stage,

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- I. The Decline of a Tradition -- II. The Reign of Bad Taste -- III. Vestigial Reminders -- IV. Gilbert, Robertson and a New Social Consciousness -- V. Dramatic Production -- VI. Patrician Evidences in a Middle-Class Age -- VII. Return of the Comedy of Manners -- VIII. Twentieth-Century Tendency and Achievement -- IX. A Word in General -- Bibliography -- Index