Why should a foolish marriage vow Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now When passion is decayed? We loved, and we loved, as long as we could, Till our love was loved out in us both. But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: "Twas pleasure first made it an oath. (1) John Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (1673), one of the first "sex comedies" of the Restoration, opens with the above song presented by Doralice, who has grown bored enough with her husband Rhodophil to consider sleeping with his friend Palamede. This song, in which Doralice questions the obligation to fidelity, might be taken as a rallying cry for the "sex comedy" genre, a loosely defined group of plays, written in the twenty years or so following the Restoration of Charles II, that explores the boundaries of acceptable sexual relations and thus potentially, by extension, analogy, or direct link, challenge traditional authoritarian structures in general. (2) As Susan Staves has shown, profound skepticism about the foundation of royal authority at this time generated parallel skepticism about traditional forms of familial authority. Both comedies and heroic plays thus often explore the possibility of marriage, like government, as contractual rather than patriarchal, granting women new capacities to choose a husband. (3) Certainly, libertine comedies sometimes include such tensions: in Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), for example, a father's authority gives way to the daughters' individual choices. (4) Yet in their exploration of libertine sexuality, and not just the individual choice of a marriage partner, these plays raise other issues as well that are not entirely explicable through tensions between Filmerian and Lockean models of authority, or through conflicts between aristocratic and bourgeois ideologies. Political and ideological readings of libertine comedies have tended to focus on the class and gender identities of individual characters, as well as the social forces that those characters engage, confront, and represent. (5) I want to suggest, however, that reading sex comedies for their representations of family, community, and nation, rather than for the individual gendered and class-related conflicts over freedom and constraint, brings their political force and political anxieties more sharply into focus. Even if she is thinking about herself, Doralice asks a broad philosophical question (why should a marriage vow ...) rather than an individual one (why should I ...) that, paradoxically, leaves traditional social structures of marriage in place but challenges its presumed foundation, understood in both the Filmerian and Lockean models to rest on fidelity.
