ABSTRACT
A new national narrative–a cavalier narrative–was needed. Restoration dramas breathed fresh air into the fusty gloom of Puritan society, they gave a taste of liberty and a new tolerance where before all had seemed straight-laced intolerance. The king Charles friends were usually happy to be conscripted into the new project for a cavalier theatre. The Cavaliers who returned from the continental exile they had shared with Charles had most of their lands and positions restored, and they smartly and smoothly took over many of the levers of power. Among the first plays staged after the Restoration were John Tatham’s attack on the roundhead Parliament in The Rump, John Ogilby’s pseudo-masque, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majesty Charles II, a positive celebration of events, and Abraham Cowley’s equally fervent The Cutter of Coleman Street. Set during the Commonwealth, the play’s sympathetic characters are constantly in danger politically, though ‘to lie in prison for concealing cavaliers will be great merit’.
