Three Restoration Comedies: The Man of Mode, The Country Wife, Love for Love

Played before the most cliquish and cynical audience in the history of the theatre, consciously trailing its coat at the puritan citizenry, it has delighted and offended over the centuries in about equal measure. Yet, take it or leave it, it offers a morality of its own, in which elegance and wit are the chief virtues, and folly, meanness, and hypocrisy the butts of its genial satire. At its best, as in the three plays included here, it produced some of the greatest comedy of all time, holding up to its age a mirror whose image, however partial, is "bright, sharp and pertinent, undimmed with the breath of years."