had to wait some years;
until, indeed, it pleased Monk, acting in accordance with the desire
of the nation, to march his army to London, and to restore the
monarchy. Encamped in Hyde Park, Monk was visited by one Rhodes, a
bookseller, who had been formerly occupied as wardrobe-keeper to King
Charles I.'s company of comedians in Blackfriars, and who now applied
to the general for permission to reopen the Cockpit in Drury Lane as a
playhouse. Monk, it seems, held histrionic art in some esteem; at any
rate the City companies, when with his council of state he dined in
their halls, were wont to entertain him with performances of a
theatrical kind: satirical farces, dancing and singing, "many shapes
and ghosts, and the like; and all to please His Excellency the Lord
General," say the newspapers of the time. Rhodes obtained the boon he
sought, and, promptly engaging a troop of actors, reopened the
Cockpit. His chief actor was his apprentice, Thomas Betterton, the son
of Charles I.'s cook. For some fifty years the great Mr. Betterton
held his place upon the stage, and upon his death was interred with
something like royal honours in Westminster Abbey.

Of the fate of Rhodes nothing further is recorded. He was the first to
give back to Londoners a theatre they might visit legally and safely;
and that done, he is heard of no more. Killigrew and Davenant were
soon invested with patent rights, and entitled to a monopoly of
theatrical management in London; probably they prospered by displacing
Rhodes--but so much cannot be positively asserted.

The drama was now out of its difficulties. Yet the influence and
effect of these did not soon abate. Upon them followed indeed a sort
of after-crop of troubles, seriously injurious to the stage. The
Cavaliers engendered a drama that was other than the drama the
Puritans had destroyed. The theatre was restored, it is true, but with
an altered constitution. It was not only that the old race of poets
and dramatists had died out, and that writing for the stage was as a
new profession, almost as a lost art. Taste had altered. As Evelyn
regretfully notes in 1662, after witnessing a performance of
Hamlet--to which, perhaps, the audience paid little heed, although the
incomparable Betterton appeared in the tragedy--"but now the old plays
begin to disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long
abroad." Shakespeare and his brother-bards were out of fashion. There
was a demand for tragedi