ABSTRACT
On 2 September 1642, Parliament ordered the closure of public theatres because stage plays or ‘Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Levity’ seemed out of joint with ‘the distracted Estate of England, threatened with a Cloud of Blood by a Civil War’. The population should turn to solemn ‘Repentance, Reconciliation, and Peace with God’ while ‘these sad causes and set Times of Humiliation so continue’ so as to return the land to peace and prosperity (Firth and Rait 1911: 26–7). The legal closure of the public playhouses did not mean a cessation of dramatic activity, however. Dale Randall (1995) and Susan Wiseman (1998) have pointed out that professional playwrights and performers continued to stage entertainments through the years 1642–60. The sense of these 18 years as a tabula rasa, an empty stage awaiting the entrance of Restoration theatre, is partly the creation of literary critics with limited ideas of what constitutes drama. Such an exclusive viewpoint was, ironically, fostered by some seventeenth-century practitioners who were anxious to mask their own contributions to culture under the protectorate when the Restoration heralded a new beginning (Potter 1989: xi). During the troubled years of the English Civil War and its aftermath, theatre, like other fundamental elements of English society, suffered a tempestuous sea change rather than extinction. As with government and religion, the events of these years produced dramatic fragmentation and reconstitutions.
