It seems certain that for some few years prior to the Restoration there had been far less stringent treatment of the players than in the earlier days of the triumph of Puritanism. Cromwell, perhaps, rather despised the stage than condemned it seriously on religious grounds; the while he did not object to indulge in buffoonery and horseplay, even in the gallery of Whitehall. Some love of music he has been credited with, and this, perhaps, induced him to tolerate the operatic dramas of
Sir William Davenant, which obtained representation during the Commonwealth: such as "The History of Sir Francis Drake," "represented by instrumental and vocal music, and by art of Perspective in Scenes," and "The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru." According to Langbaine, the two plays called "The Siege of Rhodes" were likewise acted "in stilo recitativo" during the time of the Civil Wars, and upon the Restoration were rewritten and enlarged for regular performance at the Duke of York's Theatre, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It seems to have been held that a play was no longer a play if its words were sung instead of spoken—or these representations of Davenant's works may have been altogether stealthy, and without the cognisance of the legal authorities of the time. Isaac Disraeli, however, has pointed out that in some verses, published in 1653, and prefixed to the plays of Richard Brome, there is evident a tone of exultation at the passing away of power from the hands of those who had oppressed the actors. The poet, in a moralising vein, alludes to the fate of the players as it was affected by the dissolution of the Long Parliament:
See the strange twirl of times! When such poor things
Outlive the dates of parliaments or kings!
This revolution makes exploded wit
Now see the fall of those that ruined it;
And the condemned stage hath now obtained
To see her executioners arraigned.
There's nothing permanent; those high great men
That rose from dust to dust may fall again;
And fate so orders things that the same hour
Sees the same man both in contempt and power!
For complete emancipation, however, the stage had to wait some years; until, indeed, it pleased Monk, acting in accordance with the desire of the nation, to march his army to London, and to restore the monarchy. Encamped in Hyde Park, Monk was visited by one Rhodes, a bookseller, who had been formerly occupied as wardrobe-keeper to King Charles I.'s company of comedians in Blackfriars, and who now applied to the general for permission to reopen the Cockpit in Drury Lane as a playhouse. Monk, it seems, held histrionic art in some esteem; at any rate the City companies, when with his council of state he dined in their halls, were wont to entertain him with performances of a theatrical kind: satirical farces, dancing and singing,
"many shapes and ghosts, and the like; and all to please His Excellency the Lord General," say the newspapers of the time. Rhodes obtained the boon he sought, and, promptly engaging a troop of actors, reopened the Cockpit. His chief actor was his apprentice, Thomas Betterton, the son of Charles I.'s cook. For some fifty years the great Mr. Betterton held his place upon the stage, and upon his death was interred with something like royal honours in Westminster Abbey.
Of the fate of Rhodes nothing further is recorded. He was the first to give back to Londoners a theatre they might visit legally and safely; and that done, he is heard of no more. Killigrew and Davenant were soon invested with patent rights, and entitled to a monopoly of theatrical management in London; probably they prospered by displacing Rhodes—but so much cannot be positively asserted.
The drama was now out of its difficulties. Yet the influence and effect of these did not soon abate. Upon them followed indeed a sort of after-crop of troubles, seriously injurious to the stage. The Cavaliers engendered a drama that was other than the drama the Puritans had destroyed. The theatre was restored, it is true, but with an altered constitution. It was not only that the old race of poets and dramatists had died out, and that writing for the stage was as a new profession, almost as a lost art. Taste had altered. As Evelyn regretfully notes in 1662, after witnessing a performance of Hamlet—to which, perhaps, the audience paid little heed, although the incomparable Betterton appeared in the tragedy—"but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long abroad." Shakespeare and his brother-bards were out of fashion. There was a demand for tragedies of the French school—with rhyming lines and artificial sentiment—for comedies of intrigue and equivoque, after a foreign pattern, in lieu of our old English plays of wit, humour, and character. Plagiarism, translation, and adaptation took up a secure position on the stage. The leading playwrights of the Restoration—Dryden, Shadwell, Durfey, Wycherley—all borrowed freely from the French. Dryden frankly apologised—he was required to produce so many plays all could not be of his own inventing. The King encouraged appropriation of foreign works. He drew Sir Samuel Tuke's attention to an admired Spanish comedy, advising its
adaptation to the English stage: the result was "The Adventures of Five Hours," a work very highly esteemed by Mr. Pepys. The introduction of scenery was due in a great measure to French example, although "paintings in perspective" had already been seen in an English theatre. But now scenery was imperatively necessary to a dramatic performance, and a sort of passion arose for mechanical devices and decorative appliances of a novel kind. Dryden was no reformer—in truth, to suit his own purposes, he pandered laboriously to the follies and caprices of his patrons; nevertheless, he was fully sensible of the errors of the time, and often chronicles these in his prologues and epilogues. He writes:
True wit has run its best days long ago,
It ne'er looked up since we were lost in show,
When sense in doggrel rhymes and clouds was lost,
And dulness nourished at the actor's cost.
Nor stopped it here; when tragedy was done,
Satire and humour the same fate have run,
And comedy is sunk to trick and pun.