We have seen how the English theatre, so vital an expression of Eng-
lish national life in Shakespeare's day, became powdered and per-
fumed after the French fashion as a result of its long exile during the
Commonwealth. Yet even Restoration theatre was not a slavish imi-
tation of its French predecessor. The tragedy of the period, it is true,
was more closely akin to Continental ideals and dictums and carried
the heroic French genre to a bombastic extreme. But Restoration
comedy, while paying lip service to the French, was not the comedy
of Molière, the great French master, but a thing apart. In English
Restoration comedy, as we have seen, there is none of the satiric im-
port of the French writer. Only its brilliance, its frivolity, its deco-
rativeness is French; it possessed none of the implicit criticism of
society which gave the necessary dimension and magnitude to the
greatest of French comic dramatists. Indeed, its very amorality, its
thoughtlessness, was the cause of its demise, for, as we have also
seen, as early as 1698 it was severely taken to task by Jeremy Collier,
whose criticism excited irate answers from Congreve, Vanbrugh, and
the others. But Collier's criticism was the beginning of the end for
the wits of the Restoration.

From the time of the Glorious Revolution which brought in the
"bourgeois King" William, a de-emphasis upon the importance of
court, nobility, and aristocracy in things theatrical was initiated;

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