William Mountfort’s Greenwich Park (1691)

William Mountfort’s Greenwich Park (1691), produced in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, takes comic action to the green spaces east of London where urbane rakes court witty young ladies surrounded by a lively gallery including roistering citizens, an adulterous wife and a charismatic kept mistress. This first-ever critical edition offers a fully annotated modernized text, together with an introduction analysing the processes of evolution and transition articulated by this comedy on several, interrelated levels: from the old hard comedy of the 1670s to the new humane comedy of the early 1690s, from a glamorous view of debauchery and excess to the more sober morals promoted by William and Mary, and from the Town settings of Carolean comedy to the suburbs.