Plays by Sir John Vanbrugh, Volume One

About

Sir John Vanbrugh was an architect as well as a playwright — he designed Blenheim Palace — and his Restoration comedies have the structural confidence of someone who thinks in large forms. The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), collected in this volume, are among the wittiest and most honest of late Restoration comedies. The Provoked Wife in particular, following a woman trapped in a brutish marriage who finds herself attracted to a gentleman, has more genuine sympathy for its female characters than most of the genre. Vanbrugh was responding partly to Jeremy Collier's attack on the immorality of Restoration comedy, and the plays show a playwright conscious of moral complexity.