Molière's Don Juan (1665) is one of the dramatist's most compelling and radical plays. It follows the adventures of the seductive and anti-religious Juan of Spain, and it was banned throughout Molière's lifetime by religious conservatives.

William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), a satirical play about the settling of a fortune and the arrangement of a marriage, is one of the most influential English comedies of manners from the Restoration period.

Phaedra (1677), by Jean Racine, is a tragedy based on the classical model. Although it is vastly different in style and content from any of Molière's works, it reveals another major prodigy from this period of French history.

The French philosopher Voltaire's famous work Candide (1759) is a provocative and ironic attack on optimism by a thinker who valued the philosophy he found in Moli...