author
Jeremy Collier
1650–1726
Best known for launching a famous attack on Restoration theater, this outspoken clergyman became one of the most influential moral critics of the English stage. His writing helped spark a long-running debate about what drama should be allowed to do.
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About the author
Jeremy Collier was an English clergyman, theologian, and critic born in 1650 in Cambridgeshire. He studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and later became known as a prominent Nonjuror after refusing to swear allegiance to William III and Mary following the Glorious Revolution.
He is most remembered for A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), a forceful critique of Restoration comedy. The book attacked the stage for indecency and irreligion, and it drew responses from major playwrights including John Dryden and William Congreve. That controversy gave Collier a lasting place in literary history, far beyond church politics alone.
Later in life, he also became a bishop among the Nonjurors. Today he is usually remembered as both a religious controversialist and a formidable theater critic whose arguments helped change the tone of English drama in the early eighteenth century.