1682. They were unsettled and hazardous times. The country
was convulsed by the judicial murders and horrors which followed in the
train of the pseudo-Popish Plot engineered by the abominable Gates and
his accomplices. King and Parliament were at hopeless variance. The air
was charged with strife, internecine hatreds and unrest. In such an
atmosphere and in such circumstances politics could not but make
themselves keenly felt upon the stage. The actors were indeed 'abstracts
and brief chronicles of the time', and the theatre became a very
Armageddon for the poets. As _A Lenten Prologue refus'd by the Players_
(1682) puts it:--
'Plots and Parties give new matter birth
And State distractions serve you here for mirth!
. . . . .
The Stage, like old Rump Pulpits, is become
The scene of News, a furious Party's drum.'

Produced on 4 December, 1682, Dryden and Lee's excellent Tragedy,
_The Duke of Guise_, which the Whigs vainly tried to suppress, created
a furore. Crowne's _City Politics_ (1683) is a crushing satire,
caricaturing Oates, Stephen College, old Sergeant Maynard and their
faction with rare skill. Southerne's _Loyal Brother_ (1682), eulogizes
the Duke of York; the scope of D'Urfey's _Sir Barnaby Whigg_ (1681), can
be told by its title, indeed the prologue says of the author:--
'That he shall know both parties now he glories,
By hisses th' Whigs, and by their claps the Tories.'
His _Royalist_ (1682) follows in the same track.

Even those plays which were entirely non-political are inevitably
prefaced with a mordant prologue or wound up by an epilogue that has
party venom and mustard in its tail.

It would be surprising if so popular a writer as Mrs. Behn had not put a
political play on the stage at such a juncture, and we find her well to
the fore with _The Roundheads_, which she followed up in the same year
with _The City Heiress_, another openly topical comedy.

The cast of _The Roundheads_ is not given in any printed copy, and we
have no exact means of apportioning the characters, which must have
entailed the whole comic strength of the house. It is known that
Betterton largely refrained from appearing in political comedies, and no
doubt Smith took the part of Loveless, whilst Freeman would have fallen
to Joseph Williams. Nokes was certainly Lambert; and Leigh, Wariston.
Mrs. Leigh probably played Lady Cromwell or Gilliflower; Mrs. Barry,
Lady Lambert; and Mrs. Currer, Lady D