The Trope of Masquerade Bîclea Karina-Teodora College

In England, the Baroque was a partly useful concept when discussing about the Restoration Comedy. The English theatres were closed for 18 years, during the English Civil War and English Commonwealth. They were reopened in the Restoration of Charles II (1660). During this period, the Restoration Comedy and tragicomedy appeared and were a massive success. “During the Restoration period successful performances made carefully planned use of the three hours or so that audiences could spend at the playhouse - from the "first music," which summoned the spectators to their seats, to the announcement of the next day's offering, which ended the performance by inviting them back.” (Roach, 2005: 33). They showed “the seamy sexual side of the smooth social world” (Alexander, 2000: 160). My aim in this paper is to analyze and compare the trope of masquerade (disguise, dissimulation, carnival) in Aphra Bhen’s The Rover (1681) and John Dryden’s Marriage A-la-Mode (1673).

The tragicomedy plot, however, suffers a structural split: one that is the platonic, idealistic and heroic (representing the tragic part of the plot) and the other that is anti-romantic, pragmatic and comical (that is the comic side of the plot). The masquerade in Dryden’s ...