Dublin-born Thomas Southerne has long been admired as one of the most important dramatists of the Restoration. The lack of a modern edition, however, has prevented his plays from taking their place alongside those of his friends Congreve, Wycherley, and Etherege. The present edition brings together his ten plays and the small surviving body of non-dramatic writings. Texts are based on an exhaustive study of the earliest editions and include a record of his revisions for the 1713 edition of his works, and the variants between the censored and uncensored texts of his political tragedy The Spartan Dame . Although best known for his two tragedies, The Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko , based on stories by Aphra Behn, Southerne was the author of three outstanding comedies - Sir Anthony Love , The Wives' Excuse , and The Maid's Last Prayer - which, although enjoying mixed fortunes in their own time, have been praised in recent studies of Restoration drama for their wit, psychological realism, and adventurous stagecraft. The introduction contains the first biography of Southerne to be based on a comprehensive study of the surviving documentary records.
Generous explanatory notes to the texts clarify the many contemporary allusions and relate Southerne's work to its sources and models. Students of theatre history, and of English literature of the Restoration should be specially interested by this book.