The Neglected Answers to Jeremy Collier as an Aid for a Reassessment of the Controversy about the Immorality of Restoration Comedies

While the Collier controversy is remembered as a heated debate on the morality or immorality of Restoration comedies, which marked a turning point in the history of English drama, the answers to Collier are largely forgotten or considered as inadequate. Collier himself, often regarded as a bigot, has recently even been rehabilitated because of his wide reading in the classics in the original languages as well as in contemporary literary criticism and because of his commitment to the defence of »the ethos of Christian society«. But what after closer scrutiny of his devastating comments on passages in a multitude of plays needs above all to be explained is his categorical refusal to consider the larger dramatic context. No wonder that the attacked playwrights perceived the Reformers’ demands as a threat to the foundations of drama as an art form. The arguments against Collier, presented unsystematically in scattered passages in pamphlets by Vanbrugh, Congreve, Elkanah Settle, James Drake, and John Oldmixon converge in emphasizing that the characteristic feature – and indeed the special value – of dramatic presentation consists in the active involvement of the audience in a step-by-step exploration of moral issues, dramatized in quasi real-life situations while the playwright‘s own moral standpoint is indirectly inscribed into the progress of the fable. Whereas Collier lumps Restoration comedies together as irredeemably immoral, the exploratory approach of the defenders of the stage allows for a differentiation between a variety of ways in which these plays responded to the challenge of libertinism.