the audience.
"Although your father speaks so ill of you," said the employer of
labour, "if you will come and work with me, I will give you
twelvepence a-week more than I give any other journeyman." As Kirkman
adds: "Thus was he taken for a smith bred, that was, indeed, as much
of any trade."

It seems certain that for some few years prior to the Restoration
there had been far less stringent treatment of the players than in the
earlier days of the triumph of Puritanism. Cromwell, perhaps, rather
despised the stage than condemned it seriously on religious grounds;
the while he did not object to indulge in buffoonery and horseplay,
even in the gallery of Whitehall. Some love of music he has been
credited with, and this, perhaps, induced him to tolerate the operatic
dramas of Sir William Davenant, which obtained representation during
the Commonwealth: such as "The History of Sir Francis Drake,"
"represented by instrumental and vocal music, and by art of
Perspective in Scenes," and "The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru."
According to Langbaine, the two plays called "The Siege of Rhodes"
were likewise acted _"in stilo recitativo"_ during the time of the
Civil Wars, and upon the Restoration were rewritten and enlarged for
regular performance at the Duke of York's Theatre, in Lincoln's Inn
Fields. It seems to have been held that a play was no longer a play if
its words were sung instead of spoken--or these representations of
Davenant's works may have been altogether stealthy, and without the
cognisance of the legal authorities of the time. Isaac Disraeli,
however, has pointed out that in some verses, published in 1653, and
prefixed to the plays of Richard Brome, there is evident a tone of
exultation at the passing away of power from the hands of those who
had oppressed the actors. The poet, in a moralising vein, alludes to
the fate of the players as it was affected by the dissolution of the
Long Parliament:

See the strange twirl of times! When such poor things
Outlive the dates of parliaments or kings!
This revolution makes exploded wit
Now see the fall of those that ruined it;
And the condemned stage hath now obtained
To see her executioners arraigned.
There's nothing permanent; those high great men
That rose from dust to dust may fall again;
And fate so orders things that the same hour
Sees the same man both in contempt and power!

For complete emancipation, however, the stage