{"product_id":"9780192825704","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","description":"\u003cp\u003eMarriage 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 newly edited and are presented with modernized spelling and punctuation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press, USA","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47049148367088,"sku":"9780192825704","price":12.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780192825704_p0.gif?v=1763662081","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780192825704","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}