Comedy of Manners and the Politics of Postwar British Drama

Sena Sahini graduated from Ege University, Department of English Language and Literature in 2002. She completed her MA thesis titled "Shakespearean Carnivalesque: Challenging the Authority". In 2014, she received her PhD at Ege University. She is currently working as a lecturer at the same department and teaching drama, poetry and Shakespeare.

Comedy of manners principally is a style of comedy that reflects the life, manners, and customs of sophisticated upper class; yet the genre does not aim to correct the follies and corruption in a given society but just to demonstrate it to produce laughter. For that reason, comedy of manners was not considered as a representative of political theatre until the post-war period. However, after the Second World War, British playwrights, Harold Pinter and Joe Orton, changed the conventional structure and the aim of the genre and produced more political plays by foregrounding the lower and middle-class life distinct from the previous examples. Therefore, this work aims to examine the history and the development of comedy of manners in British theatre throughout centuries, from the ancient world to the post-war Britain, and to analyse its political position and attitude in the post-war period by analysing The Homecoming by Harold Pinter and What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton.