num_pages: 504
description: Marriage and its discontents lie at the heart of Restoration comedy. In all four of the great plays gathered here, a married woman confronts her would-be seducer. Each dramatist, however, totally reinterprets the situation. Thomas Otway's The Soldier's Fortune converts adultery into political revenge. Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleves offers a potent and perplexing portrait of a libertine in action at the sixteenth-century French court. John Dryden's Amphitryon, set in ancient Thebes, retells the story in which Jupiter lures the virtuous Alcmena into cuckolding her husband by a stratagem that throws into doubt the very nature of human identity. Thomas Southerne's The Wives' Excuse reinvents, for the new circumstances of the 1690s, the familiar Restoration plot of a wife spurred towards infidelity by her partner's failings. All of the plays have been newlyedited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation.
language: English
title: Four Restoration Marriage Plays: The Soldier's Fortune; The Princess of Cleves; Amphitryon; Or the Two Sosias; The Wives' Excuse; Or Cuckolds Make Themselves
titlecomplete: Four Restoration Marriage Plays: The Soldier's Fortune; The Princess of Cleves; Amphitryon; Or the Two Sosias; The Wives' Excuse; Or Cuckolds Make Themselves
ratings_count: 8
publisher: Oxford University Press