THE LONDON STAGE, 1660-I7OO xxii
to purposes other than theatrical. In addition, the playwrights of the old
regime no longer were productive. And a new generation had appeared in
London, one which had little intimate knowledge of acting, the drama, or
the playhouse. One can note this frame of mind in Samuel Pepys, who in 1660
and for some years later found the reopened theatrical scene a dazzling sight
and who occasionally mentioned, as though it was interesting but not
exceptional, taking to the theatre a friend who had never before seen a
staged play and was therefore vague concerning the traditions of the drama.
During the Commonwealth the drama had not, of course, been extinguished,
for old plays had been given (sometimes in public, often in private) and
new ones, such as Sir William Davenant’s operatic works, had been com¬
posed and staged. Nevertheless, the professional theatre, experienced
actors, and knowledgeable spectators had to be re-created. In bringing the
theatre to life again, the managers, playwrights, performers, and the public
developed after 1660 many practices, including some striking innovations,
which set the pattern for the London professional theatres for the next
hundred and fifty years.
Although it is difficult to determine the relative importance of the
innovations and alterations, it is not difficult to select those which had
important effects upon the English stage to the end of the eighteenth
century: (i) The creation of a monopoly of theatrical enterprises, ordinarily
restricted to two patent companies, sometimes compressed into a single
company; (2) the introduction of women to act upon the stage, altering the
old custom of the boy actor in female roles; (3) the altered design of the
playhouses, with the development of the pit as a main seating area, the
stage-boxes, front-boxes, and side-boxes as the more expensive and, theo¬
retically, more desirable locations, and the first and second galleries for less
expensive tastes; (4) the greatly increased use of scenes, especially changeable
scenery, and machines, with an accompanying emphasis upon spectacle in
both dramatic and operatic productions; (5) an increasing enlargement of
the day’s program by means of entr’acte entertainments of singing and
dancing, accompanied by a correspondingly greater emphasis in the public
concert halls upon vocal and instrumental music. During the forty years from
1660 and 1700 and during most of the eighteenth century, these practices,
both singly and in unison, had extremely important effects upon the course
of English drama and stagecraft.
Although the first of these events — the creation of a two-company
monopoly — apparently came about without extended discussion of the
wisdom of a theatrical monopoly, it did not materialize without opposition.