Discuss the Restoration’s sentimental comedy

The English sentimental comedy is a kind of comedy that achieved some popularity with respectable middle-class audiences.

• – It showed virtue rewarded by domestic bliss, in contrast with the comedy of manners
• – Its plots, usually involving unbelievably good middle-class couples, emphasized pathos (=an appeal to the audience’s all kinds of emotions) rather than humour
• – Pioneered by Richard Steele in The Funeral and more fully in The Conscious Lovers
• – It survived into 19th-century melodrama
• – It was opposed by Sheridan and Goldsmith who attempted a partial return to the comedy of manners