The theatre they favoured was scarcely the theatre that had flourished in England before the Civil War.

Dryden reminds the spectators, in one of his prologues-- You now have habits, dances, scenes, and rhymes, High language often, ay, and sense sometimes.
There was an end of dramatic poetry, as it was understood under Elizabeth.

Blank verse had expired or swooned away, never again to be wholly reanimated.

Fantastic tragedies in rhyme, after the French pattern, became the vogue; and absolute translations from the French and Spanish for the first time occupied the English stage.

Shakespeare and his colleagues had converted existing materials to dramatic uses, but not as did the playwrights of the Restoration.