The Sullen Lovers
The Sullen Lovers is a 1668 comedy directed by Thomas Shadwell .
It is the first of 18 plays that Shadwell wrote between 1668 and 1692. The Sullen Lovers is a prose comedy in five acts with a prologue and an epilogue . It is written in the style of Ben Jonson . The main source of the play was Molières Les Fâcheux from 1661. Shadwell, like Molière, presents a number of typical representatives of court society with their typical manners, absurd habits, quirks and annoying quirks , by which the misanthropic couple Emilia and Stanford feel persecuted .
The prologue of the play was the occasion to a controversy between the young and the Shadwell just for Poet Laureate appointed John Dryden . In the debate about fundamental questions of comedy that was started from here, Shadwell set the comedy of humor of Ben Jonson, preferred by him, against the comedy of manners preferred by Dryden . He also makes fun of Robert and Edward Howard, who were related by marriage to Dryden. Both were authors of heroic tragedies that Shadwell loathed. Dryden and Shadwell subsequently continued their argument about the nature of comedy and tragedy in the prefaces of their next plays.
The audience liked the play. Samuel Pepys writes in his diaries that he has seen it three times. King Charles II had it performed to celebrate his sister's return from a trip abroad.
expenditure
- Tho. Shadwell: The Sullen Lovers: Or, The Impertinents. A Comedy Acted by Highness the Duke of Yorkes Servants. Henry Herringman, London 1668 ( digitized version ).
- Montague Summers (Ed.): The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell. Volume 1: The sullen lovers. The royal shepherdesse. The humorists. The Fortune press, London 1927 (Reprint: B. Blom, 1968).
literature
- Asmus Erichsen: Thomas Shadwell's comedy “The Sullen Lovers” in relation to Molière's comedies “Le Misanthrope” and “Les Fâcheux”. Meyer, Flensburg 1906 (dissertation Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel; digitized ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ NNDB, Thomas Shadwell .
- ↑ Gustav Ungerer: Shadwell's The Libertine: A Forgotten Restoration Don Juan Play. In: Sederi. Yearbook 1. 1990. pp. 223–240 [1] (pdf, online)
- ^ Thomas Shadwell Essay. The Sullen Lovers. Retrieved April 4, 2016.