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Almost all ‘histories’ of eighteenth-century English drama have focussed on the new plays. This is a natural and in some ways defensible way to proceed, but ‘new plays’ are a product of the theatre system inwhich they are produced, and any attempt to treat them in glorious isolation must inevitably produce fallacious and misleading results. New plays did not beget one another, and neither were they necessarily a major influence on their immediate successors. Between 1730 and 1790 something like 85 per cent of the mainpiece performances in London were of old plays – many of them several decades old or more. New plays tended to be written as vehicles for the principal performers, and consequently the parts those performers took in stock plays had a major influence on the new works written for them. Innovation was rarely a desideratum; neither was literary merit a prime concern. Whatever critics of the time had to say, plays served primarily as popular entertainment. To comprehend eighteenth-century drama as it was written and experienced in its own day, one must start by realising three things. First, only a few of the plays have ever received attention from twentieth-century critics, and most of those plays are atypical. Second, a performance did not consist of one comedy or tragedy viewed in decorous silence. People came, wandered about and left; those who stayed bought refreshments and talked. Many of the mainpieces were not comedy or tragedy but musical. Most nights included an afterpiece as well as a mainpiece, and a great many nights featured interpolated entertainments of various sorts – song, dance, spectacle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Restoration theatre, while in many ways a new creation, maintained important continuities with pre-1642 practice. The indoor playhouse lit by candlelight and charging high prices had existed since Shakespeare's time. Perspective scenery had been used in Caroline court masques and in D'Avenant's interregnum entertainments. Although the Elizabethan thrust stage (out into the audience space) was abandoned, acting took place in front of the proscenium arch, not behind it as in present-day scenic theatres. Actors still had to be the ‘servants’ of some powerful person: the King's Company, who were regarded as legal successors to the earlier King's Men, belonged to the royal household and the Duke's Company to that of the king's brother, James, Duke of York. Caroline models of censorship were restored, with the Master of the Revels required to approve scripts for performance and the Surveyor of the Press those for printing. Elements of the old actor–sharer system were in evidence as late as 1695 with the brilliant Lincoln's Inn Fields troupe. What then had changed? The most momentous innovation was the restriction of trade to no more than two companies at any one time, which was undertaken to protect the large investments in buildings and scenery and the steep rise in manpower necessary to meet raised audience expectations. The King's Company patentee, Thomas Killigrew, boasted to Pepys that the stage was ‘now by his pains a thousand times better and more glorious then ever heretofore’. The new roofed theatres were handsome, brick constructions, employing the continental technology of illusionism based on wing-and-shutter scenery (that is, painted canvas backgrounds and borders run on from the sides) and the use of machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

READERS whose interest in the Elizabethan drama is focused primarily on plays usually find Henslowe's diary a disappointment. The pedestrian prose, erratict spelling, chaotic organization, and (especially) the confusing figures seem as remote as it is possible to be from the passion and poetry of the Elizabethan drama. What, such readers wonder, do these endless lists and dry accounts have to do with the work of Shakespeare or Marlowe? While understandable, such an attitude ignores (or under-emphasizes) the fact that Elizabethan plays (like those of other ages) are rooted in the theatrical conditions of their time, and have developed as they have, at least in part, in response to those conditions. To understand Shakespeare and his contemporaries fully, therefore, we must try to imagine their works in their original theatrical context. As a guide to that context, Henslowe's diary is indispensable. Henslowe did not prepare his diary for theatre historians, however, and to understand his records it is necessary to recast them. Information that Henslowe recorded chronologically needs to be reconciled with the actors’ playing seasons; expenses have to be set off against income; details relating to individual plays must be collated, and a distinction made between expenditures of different kinds. This abstracting and summarizing of information in the accounts has been done in the series of tables appended to this volume, where interested readers are urged to check out the claims made in the discursive commentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]