3 - Adaptations and revivals

Summary

Seven years before Charles II was returned to power, eleven after the Puritan regime had brought all legitimate theatrical activity in London to an abrupt halt, Aston Cokaine, writing a dedicatory poem to Richard Brome's belatedly published Five New Plays (1653), was already looking forward to the day when the playhouses would reopen. Presciently, he imagined a restored theatre which would be first and foremost a place for the revival of England's native dramatic classics, and only secondarily a venue where living playwrights might resume their interrupted careers:

Then shall learn'd Jonson reassume his seat,

Revive the Phoenix by a second heat,

Create the Globe anew, and people it

By those that flock to surfeit on his wit.

Judicious Beaumont, and th'ingenious soul

Of Fletcher too may move without control,

Shakespeare (most rich in humors) entertain

The crowded theatres with his happy vein.

Davenant and Massinger, and Shirley, then

Shall be cried up again for famous men.

As Cokaine's poem in part suggests (apparently remembering Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights among the glories of the lost Caroline stage), the repertories of the pre-Civil War playhouses had always included a substantial percentage of revived plays, some of them half a century old by the time the theatres were closed in 1642.