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.