This course examines Restoration Comedy in the context of political and cultural changes brought about by the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Emphasis is placed on gender representations in a game of power in which the aristocratic male sexual and political ascendancy inscribes the Puritan and business-oriented middle classes’ defeat as impotence. Hence, the winners of the Civil War are humiliated in a kind of comedy that celebrates wit, male cuckolding, homosocial bonding and cynical materialism, especially in Etherege and Wycherley, while a shift in moral values is noted in Congreve’s transitional comedy.