Stuart Tave on Restoration Theory of Comedy

Frontispiece to The Wits or Sport upon Sport (London, 1662). Attributed to Francis Kirkman. Taken from Wikipedia entry "Droll" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droll; 2010/10/13)

Stuart M. Tave is the William Rainey Harper Professor Emeritus in the College and the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago, 1960); New Essay by De Quincy (Princeton, 1966); Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago, 1973); Robert Bage's "Hermsprong" (Pennsylvania State, 1982); and Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies: an Essay on Comedies (Chicago, 1993). On June 3, 2000, he received the 2000 Norman Maclean Faculty Award at an Alumni Assembly in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.

Here is a passage by Stuart Tave on Restoration theory of comedy:

In Restoration theory of comedy, largely a derivative and a reduction of Renaissance theory, it was a commonplace that the function of comedy is to copy the foolish and knavish originals of the age and to expose, ridicule, satirize them. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that the best comic works present amiable originals, often models of good nature, whose little peculiarities are not satirically instructive, but objects of delight and love.

—The Amiable Humorist*viii

*Tave, Stuart M. The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.