Four Restoration Marriage Plays
An Oxford World's Classics paperback of four late-seventeenth-century plays about marriage, adultery, and the various ways cuckolds make themselves. The volume includes Otway's The Soldier's Fortune, Lee's The Princess of Cleves, Dryden's Amphitryon, and Southerne's The Wives' Excuse, with modernized spelling and the usual scholarly apparatus. Oxford has packaged them in the uniform World's Classics format: small type, narrow margins, and a cover that assumes you are buying the text, not the design. The plays are bawdy, cynical, and occasionally cruel, which is what Restoration comedy is for.Ideal reader: the reader who finds Shakespeare's comedies too sentimental, or the playwright looking for proof that marriage has been a problem since the proscenium arch.
