[2]
The Restoration naturally brought with it a revived taste for those
elegant amusements, which, during the usurpation, had been condemned as
heathenish, or punished as appertaining especially to the favourers of
royalty. To frequent them, therefore, became a badge of loyalty, and a
virtual disavowal of those puritanic tenets which all now agreed in
condemning. The taste of the restored monarch also was decidedly in
favour of the drama. At the foreign courts, which it had been his lot to
visit, the theatre was the chief entertainment; and as amusement was
always his principal pursuit, it cannot be doubted that he often sought
it there. The interest, therefore, which the monarch took in the
restoration of the stage, was direct and personal. Had it not been for
this circumstance, it seems probable that the general audience, for a
time at least, would have demanded a revival of those pieces which had
been most successful before the civil wars; and that Shakespeare,
Massinger, and Fletcher, would have resumed their acknowledged
superiority upon the English stage. But as the theatres were
re-established and cherished by the immediate influence of the
sovereign, and of the court which returned with him from exile, a taste
formed during their residence abroad dictated the nature of
entertainments which were to be presented to them. It is worthy of
remark, that Charles took the models of the two grand departments of the
drama from two different countries.
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