This new anthology provides seventeen key plays by twelve dramatists of the Restoration period in an anthology designed specifically for course use, with annotations and judiciously modernized texts. It offers a representative sampling of the types of play of the period, including plays by both men and women - sex comedy, moral comedy, heroic drama, Shakespearean adaptation and political history.

David Womersley has been a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford since 1984. He has published widely on English Literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Previous publications include, Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1994), Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays (1997), Augustan Critical Writing (1997), The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1988).