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 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.