When Theatre Refused to Die by Philip Rowe

June 8, 2025·42 min·3 clips

Discover how actors performed shortened plays in secret to evade soldiers during the Puritan crackdown on theatre.

The playhouses refused to stay buried. After the closures, London's old mix of roughly eight public theatres and about as many regular inn performances gives way to a much tighter Restoration deal. Two men get the keys: Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant. Their royal privileges become permanent letters patent in April 1662, which means the comeback is real, but it comes with a lock on the door. The king likes theatre and likes both men, yet the Lord Chamberlain still watches the whole business. Killigrew is court theatre through and through. He had been a page to Charles I, grew up near power, and once volunteered as an extra just to see plays for nothing. Not bad work if you can get it. His exile service and Restoration loyalty pay off when he becomes groom of the bedchamber and, in Samuel Pepys's telling, court jester as well. Of course he grabs the chance to run a company with his own name on it. Davenant has a different story. He is lower-born than Killigrew, but educated, known as a man of letters, and stubborn enough to keep theatrical life alive during the interregnum. That counts. The excerpt treats Restoration theatre as survival and reset at once. Art returns, but only after licensing, narrowing, and supervision. The stage gets its swagger back. The cost is a London theatre world held by fewer people and dependent on royal permission. Shakespeare is not treated like a museum piece either. Later efforts to adapt or improve him can sound clumsy, even grating, but they also show theatre doing what it always does: bending toward the present, sometimes with style, sometimes with a wince.

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