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.
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