An Introduction to Fifty British Plays 1660-1900

The golden age of the English drama, with Shakespeare at its focal point, came to a dramatic and sudden end when Cromwell closed the theatres in 1642. The art of drama was muzzled for barely two decades before a new flowering of the theatre came with the restoration of the Stuart throne.

John Cargill Thompson's Literature Guide pinpoints fifty major landmarks of dramatic writing from the Restoration theatre through the sophisticated creations of Goldsmith and Sheridan to the stages of Victorian England where Wilde and Pinero saw the curtain fall on the last act of the nineteenth century.