ABSTRACT

The new cavalier narrative demanded new plays to endorse it, even glamorise it. Thus, despite the eighteen-year gap, playwriting resumed in 1660 with gusto, and as early as the fourth season after the reopening of the playhouses, sixteen new plays were staged. In 1676–7, there were twenty-three new plays, so that the need for continually reviving Elizabethan and Jacobean drama quickly lost its urgency.