‘“Fruit of that monst’rous night!”: Le théâtre anglais 1660-1760 et les plaisirs de la nuit’, Fruit of that monst'rous night: English theatre 1660-1760 and the pleasures of the night

This article focuses upon the dominant leitmotifs in the staging of « monst’rous night » on the English stage from the end of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century. As this period of theatre history is explored, it soon becomes apparent that dramatists were responding keenly to dramatic conventions and figurative representations of night which to a great extent were inherited from their predecessors writing for the stage – which is to say the dramatists of the medieval and Elizabethan/Jacobean periods. Tragedies dating from the early modern period, the Restoration and the eighteenth century have been afforded a good measure of scholarship concerning the dramatic status and functions of staging night scenes. The present discussion for its own part ranges across a large corpus of playtexts from the period and considers the presentations of the experience of night on the London stage from 1660 to 1760 in tragic, comic, satirical, musical drama and opera.