Less than 40 years after the reign of Elizabeth I and the vibrant London theatres of Shakespeare in the English Renaissance, Elizabeth’s successors, James I and then Charles I, attempted to force an England used to a strong parliament and riven by religious differences into a monarchically governed state unified under a single religion.  The result was a series of wars that resulted in the trial of Charles I for treason and his spectacularly public execution in front of Whitehall Palace in 1649.  A tradition of anti-theatricality, rooted in dissenting Protestantism, almost completely eradicated public theatre during the Commonwealth and Protectorate.  When the Protectorate weakened and then failed under the governance of Cromwell’s son, and Charles’ son, Charles II, returned from his exile in France, one of his first actions was to license two London theatres, the Duke of York’s Men under William Davenant’s management in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the King’s Company, first at the Red Bull and then at the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, under Thomas Killigrew.  Davenant and Killigrew had both fought on the Royalist side in the Civil Wars, and the theatres they ran were spaces that sought to restore the glory of monarchy through fictions of strong male heroism, wit, and homosociality, with sumptuous spectacles and costuming. (The King and members of his court even lent their gorgeous, ceremonial garb to actors performing make-believe kings and courtiers.)   Charles himself was a regular at the theatres, which became spaces for performing royal power as well as plays.  The playhouse was not only a place to see actors perform; it was a space for social performance by the audience.  Aside from the flirting, bon mots, and ogling that took place among the audience, elite young men also showed off their finest clothes by paying to sit on the stage during the play’s action.  The theatres were not, however, the exclusive domain of the elite.  As Henry Misson notes in 1698, many people from different walks of life who could afford a ticket went to the theatre:

“The Pit is an Amphitheatre, fill'd with Benches without Backboards, and adorn'd and cover'd with green Cloth. Men of Quality, particularly the younger Sort, some Ladies of Reputation and Virtue, and abundance of Damsels that haunt for Prey, sit all together in this Place, Higgledy-piggledy, chatter, toy, play, hear, hear not. Farther up, against the Wall, under the first Gallery and just opposite to the Stage, rises another Amphitheatre, which is taken by persons of the best Quality, among whom are generally very few Men. The Galleries, whereof there are only two Rows, are fill'd with none but ordinary People, particularly the Upper one.”

In this socially heterogeneous space, both audience and actors perform different social identities as well as collective expressions of what it meant to be British. 

Women, as we can see from Misson’s description, were important to audience performance; they were also, literally, major players in stage performance as well.  When Charles re-established the London theatres he also changed them forever by allowing women to act professionally.  This change did not happen all at once; a pipeline of actresses did not stand ready to take their parts.  Very quickly, however, the novelty and titillation of women acting drew audiences and motivated women to seek a living in the theatre.  Actresses, initially, were not clearly distinguishable from the “Damsels who hunt for prey” in the audience.   Many had made their living as prostitutes before they became actresses (as was the case of the famous Nell Gwyn) and to be an actress was to step into a sexual market in which the female performer almost automatically became the goods.  It would be a mistake, however, to reduce these early actresses to opportunistic prostitutes; in a society in which women were limited in their work choices outside the space of home and family, acting provided a new venue for female professionalism and actresses could make a living from their artistic as well as sexual skills. 

The presence of sexually available women in the pit and on the stage conduced to making the theatre a venue for masculine sexual display by the audience as much, perhaps more than, the actors on stage.  The King took a starring role in this display.  Charles not only patronized the theatres, but took many of its most attractive actresses as mistresses (including the above-mentioned Gwyn).  The publicly displayed virility and sexual promiscuity of the monarch did nothing to endear him to many on the losing side of the Civil Wars, the anti-theatrical dissenting Protestants, and it was not exactly embraced whole-heartedly by his less hostile, but more sober Anglican supporters, but it did contribute to the personal charisma that made the British public want to know their king as a man as well as a monarch, a feature of celebrity that performance theorist Joseph Roach calls “public intimacy,” the desire to know and feel close to a public figure.  As Roach argues, Charles had “It,” the star quality that gives its possessor the power to fascinate and even create love in people, including those whom the “It” person has never met.  Many of Charles’ courtiers, such as John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester (the model for Etherege’s Dorimant in The Man of Mode) contributed to the performance of a masculine elite surrounding Charles and sharing in his personal and sexual charisma.  If the heroic Antony embodies elements of that charisma in tragedy, so does the witty hero of Restoration comedy. 

Charles needed all the star power he could muster.  He faced a daunting task in re-establishing English stability and prosperity after devastating civil wars.  He was not helped by an outbreak of bubonic plague in London in 1665, nor a fire the next year that burned down most of the traditional, walled city of London.  Charles’ monarchy was not wealthy, and he depended (secretly) on financial support from the Catholic French monarchy.  He weathered serious challenges to his authority, especially the Exclusion Crisis that nearly outlawed the hereditary succession of his Catholic brother, James.  When Charles died in 1685, James’s reign as a Catholic king over a Protestant nation was intolerable, however, and in 1688, William of Orange and his consort Mary “invaded” England by invitation, taking over the English throne and sending James into exile in France.  For the last decade of the century, the theatres had lost their royal “star,” but their potential as a venue for social exchange and the expression of political power was established and would be fulfilled over the long eighteenth century.  Playhouses, with, by the mid-eighteenth century, the periodical press, constitute the social media of the long eighteenth century. 

This is not to claim, however, that the Restoration theatres did not have a seamier side or that they did not undergo financial and administrative struggles.  The glamour and sexual appeal of the actresses could easily turn to exploitation and even violence.  In 1665 the actress Rebecca Marshal petitioned the King for protection from “one Mark Trevor of the Temple Esq.” who “several times barbarously and insolently affronted” the actress “as well upon the stage as off.”  Her court deposition continued to complain that:

“the said Trevor assaulted her violently in a coach and, after many horrid oaths and threats that he would be revenged of her for complaining to my Lord Chamberlain formerly of him, pursued her with his sword in his hand; and when by flight she had secured herself in a house, he continued his abusive language and broke the windows of the adjoining house.”  

The early theatre historian Wright complained that “the playhouses are so extremely pestered with vizard masks and their trade, (occasioning continual quarrels and abuses) that many of the more civilized parts of the town are uneasy in the company and shun the theatre as they would a house of scandal.”  Actors were subject to “punishment” at the hands of affronted male audience members if they were perceived as encroaching upon gentlemanly prerogatives, such as carrying a sword or sleeping with a desirable actress.  The playhouse could be a violent space as well as a space of sociability and celebrity. 

The London theatres were also just finding their financial legs.  The two companies, the King’s and the Duke’s, merged in 1683 when the King’s Company failed financially.  Mismanagement after the original regimes of Killigrew and Davenant led the manager of the United Company, Christopher Rich, to squeeze his actors financially to the point of rebellion and establishing their own theatre under the management of the actor Thomas Betterton in 1695, when, again, two playhouses competed for audiences in the London entertainment industry. 

Music, dance, and spectacular scenery and stage effects were risky but essential investments in the theatres’ imperative to draw in paying customers.  Experimental mixings of opera with English plays, such as Henry Purcell’s remix of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Fairy Queen, featured impressive special effects, but were too expensive to sustain for more than a few performances, as John Downes reports: 

“The Fairy Queen, made into an opera, from a Comedy of Mr. Shakespeare's: This in Ornaments was Superior to the other Two [King Arthur and The Prophetess]; especially in Cloaths, for all the Singers and Dancers, Scenes, Machines and Decorations, all most profusely set off; and excellently perform'd, chiefly the Instrumental and Vocal part Compos'd by the said Mr Purcel, and Dances by Mr Priest.  The Court and Town were wonderfully satisfy'd with it; but the Expenses in setting it out being so great, the Company got very little by it.”  

Other musical adaptations of Shakespeare were more durable.  Downes reports on:

“the tragedy of Macbeth, altered by Sir William Davenant; being dressed in all its finery, as new clothes, new scenes, machines, as flyings for the witches; with all the singing and dancing in it. … It being excellently performed, being in the nature of an opera, it recompensed double the expense; it proves still a lasting play.”  

Except for the short time in which the King’s Company played at the Red Bull, the playhouses themselves were not the open-roofed structure of Shakespeare’s Globe.  Davenant’s theatre, with capacity for scenic design and expanded space for the audience, set the template for Christopher Wren’s design for the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and many eighteenth-century theatres to follow. Colley Cibber, the eighteenth-century actor and manager of Drury Lane Theatre between 1711 and 1732, describes the Theatre Royal prior to 1696:

“It must be observed then that the area or platform of the old stage projected about four foot forwarder, in a semi-oval figure, parallel to the benches of the pit; and that the former lower doors of entrance for the actors were brought down between the two foremost (and then only) pilasters; in the pace of which doors now the two stage boxes are fixed.  That were the doors of entrance now are, there formerly stood two additional side-wings, in front to a full set of scenes, which had then almost a double effect in their loftiness and magnificence. 

“By this original form, the usual station of the actors, in almost every scene was advanced at least ten foot nearer to the audience than they now can be; because, not only from the stage’s being shortened in front, but likewise from the additional interposition of those stage boxes, the actors (in respect to the spectators that fill them) are kept so much more backward from the main audience than they used to be. But when the actors are in possession of that forwarder space to advance upon, the voice was then more in the centre of the house so that the most distant ear had scarce the least doubt of difficulty in hearing what fell from the weakest utterance: all objects were thus drawn nearer to the sense; every painted scene was stronger; every grand scene and dance more extended; every rich or fine-coloured habit had a more lively lustre; nor was the minutest motion of a feature (properly changing with the passion or humour it suited) ever lost, as they frequently must be in the obscurity of too great a distance.  And how valuable an advantage the facility of hearing distinctly is to every well-acted scene, every common spectator is a judge.”

This stage was a compromise between the thrust stage of the Elizabethan theatre and the nineteenth-century recessed stage with proscenium arch, which allowed actors close contact with the audience while also facilitating impressive scenery and special effects—such as the flying chariot used by Hecate in Macbeth—in the background.  An evening at the theatre started in the late afternoon to take advantage of natural daylight, but theatres were lit by candles (a consistently large figure in theatre budgets throughout the century) augmented with reflective surrounds and lanterns.  While footlights and lighting over the stage brightened the performance space, the pit, gallery, and boxes were also well-lit during performances, facilitating social performances by audiences who were often as interested in looking at and hearing each other as they were engaged by the players.  Writing of an evening at the playhouse on February 18, 1667, Samuel Pepys reports on giving up on a play in the face of the more proximate performance of the audience around him:

“To the King’s House to The Maid’s Tragedy; but vexed all the while with two talking ladies and Sir Charles Sedley, yet pleased to hear their discourse, he being a stranger.  And one of the ladies would and did sit with her mask on, all the play and being exceedingly witty as ever I hear woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; but was, I believer, a virtuous woman and of quality.  He would fain know who she was, but she would not tell; yet did give him many pleasant hints of her knowledge of him, by that means setting his brains at work to find out who she was, and did give him leave to use all means to find out who she was but pulling off her mask.  He was mighty witty and she also, making sport of him very inoffensively, that a more pleasant rencontre I never heard.  By that means lost the pleasure of the play wholly, to which now and then Sir Charles Sedley’s exceptions against both words and pronouncing them were very pretty.”

Aristocratic performances by courtiers such as Sedley, a notorious libertine and a prominent figure in Charles’ court, and the glittering spectacle and repartee of the women who may or may not be part of the King’s court themselves, augmented the celebrity of Charles and his court and made the theatre the place to be, regardless of the play.  Pepys grumpily notes that even those who could barely afford the lowest price of admission were there, as he writes on January 1, 1669 of a visit to the Duke of York’s playhouse:

“Here a mighty company of citizens, prentices and others; and it makes me observe that when I began first to be able to bestow a play on myself, I do not remember that I saw by half of the ordinary prentices and mean people in the pit at 2 s 6 d a piece, as now. … So much the vanity and prodigality of the age is to be observed in this particular.”  

This last sentence, from the addicted play-goer and lover-of-all-things-theatre Pepys, points to the ambiguities of the theatres’ social function and meaning.  The playhouses were both centers of sociability and dangerous sites of contact between different classes and both genders with the potential for social conflict as well as sexual misbehavior.  The rowdiness and even violence with which eighteenth-century audiences often “performed” their point of view on actors, plays, managers, playwrights, and anything else they had an opinion about grew from a Restoration playhouse that was playground and venue for social connection between many different kinds of people, from aristocrat to orange girl, the young woman who sold fruit—and herself—as the audience watched—or didn’t watch—the plays.

While the people who wrote the plays for this mixed audience were all, of course, better educated and of higher social standing than the servants in the galleries or the lower artisans in the pit, playwrights, too, were a heterogeneous group.  The demand for new plays was met by talent that crossed both status and gender lines.  While many held claim to gentlemanly status, John Dryden, the poet laureate and author of All For Love and many other heroic tragedies and several adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, importantly opened a space in the culture of Restoration theatre for the professional writer—regardless of social status—as the best authority on what is good and not good in dramatic literature.  His prefatory writing to his plays jumpstarted the tradition of English literary criticism that would thrive over the course of the centuries to follow.  Women, too, stepped up to the demand for new plays, one of the most successful being Aphra Behn, the author of The Widdow Ranter as well as many popular and much-performed plays, novels, and poetry.  Women were not only integral to the performance of plays, but writers such as Behn, Mary Pix, and Catherine Trotter played major roles in shaping the archive of Restoration dramatic texts.

The plays themselves were also a diverse mix of word-rich tragedy and comedy as well as spectacular “operas”—the term applied to a wide variety of shows heavy on music, dance, scenery, and special effects.  Italian opera of the kind that we associate with the term was also introduced during the Restoration, and would become a strong competitor for ticket sales among aristocratic audience members later in the early eighteenth century.  Initially, Davenant’s company at Lincoln Inns’ Fields specialized in spectacle and music, while Killigrew’s featured the witty comedies that we associate so strongly with Restoration theatre today.  The demand for plays that exploded with the restoration of the theatres meant that the works of Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, and other playwrights of the Renaissance and early seventeenth-century were divided up between the companies and formed substantial parts of the repertoire.  Adaptation was rampant; Restoration theatre professionals had no compunction about re-fitting old plays, especially Shakespeare’s, to meet new audiences’ tastes and demands.  (Hence the spectacular, “operatic” Tempest in this volume.) 

This productive if sometimes contentious contrast between formally elaborate performances that appealed to the audience’s sensory experience (and love for blank verse) and the more colloquial, informal humor of bantering characters that we see in plays such as The Country Wife and The Man of Mode attracted a broad range of audiences for a broad range of reasons.  Pepys, for example, an amateur musician, was as passionate about the music of the stage as he was about the plays themselves, often pushing himself to learn a new piece of music he had recently heard in the theatre.  Music with lyrics was printed and sold, a complement to the performances on the stage.  The plays themselves were usually printed within a few days of their first production, and contributed to the cultivation of an audience of readers as well as listeners and observers. 

The long partnership between the publication and performance industries begins in the Restoration, and although theatre reviews would not become an important part of every daily or weekly newspaper until the middle of the eighteenth century, the dramatic criticism of playwrights such as Dryden as well as the symbiotic relationship between the performance and printing of plays, the relays between print text and performance, reading and sensory experience, began functioning in the Restoration like the firings between synapses of a great, social brain.  The print industry responded to a growing market during this period, creating an archive of documents—from plays themselves to theatrical biographies and histories as well as visual prints—that can help us access across three centuries the ephemeral performances that are the beating pulse of any theatre.

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Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England.  Translated by John Ozell. London: De. Browne, 1719, 219–20.

It. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007. 

David Thomas and Arnold Hare, Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History.  Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 185–6.

Prostitutes.

Thomas and Hare, 189.

Roscius Anglicanus.  Ed. Montague Summers.  Bronx, NY: Benjamin Blom, 1968, 42–3.

Downes, 33.

An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber, written by himself.  Ed. R. W. Lowe. New York: AMS Press, 1966, vol. 2, 84–6. 

The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Eds. Robert Lathum and William Matthews. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970.  February 18, 1667. Vol. 8, 71–2.

Pepys, vol. 9, 2.