© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Literature Compass 5/2 (2008): 174–194, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00513.x Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama: New Directions in the Field Laura J. Rosenthal* University of Maryland Abstract This essay offers an overview of recent critical books published on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, with a glance back to the critical history of this field. The essay emphasizes critical explorations of the earlier part of the period and provides a bibliography for further reading. If the novel still to some extent dominates eighteenth-century studies, in recent years the drama has emerged as a genre of considerable interest. Much innovative scholarship lately has revived interest in plays of this period by exploring their complex constructions of the gender, subjectivity, class, authorship, nationalism, ideology, and imperial relations, revealing that they differ in key ways from the period’s fiction. Taken traditionally as a weakness but in more recent work as a point of interest, the drama often confronts head-on certain issues that the novel tends to raise only obliquely or implicitly. In The London Merchant (1731), for example, Thorowgood makes an explicit case for the worthiness of the merchant class; in The Way of the World (1700), Millamant negotiates up front her position as a wife; in Inkle and Yarico (1787), the young merchant tries to sell into slavery the Native American women who rescued him and carries his child; in The Man of Mode (1676), Dorimant argues that the acceptable transgressions of the elite should be forbidden to shoemakers; in Cato (1713), the hero pronounces on the relationship between skin color and virtue (there is none); in the late-century pantomime Omai (1785), Captain Cook literally becomes a god. Readers of Samuel Richardson may come to believe that this period equated female virtue with virginity, but in Robert Dodsley’s popular The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737) the heroine, after having been seduced by a rakish courtier, happily marries her sweetheart. The plays do not necessarily confront the period’s pressing social changes with a more progressive vision than other genres; nevertheless, they tend to address certain issues more openly and more confrontationally. Until the last thirty years or so, however, most Restoration and eighteenth- century plays met with one of two critical fates: neglect or scandal. Many,