SOURCE: “The Killigrew Folio: Private Playhouses and the Restoration Stage,” in Theatre Survey, Vol. XIX, No. 2, November 1978, pp. 119-38.

In the following essay, Visser argues that the revisions that Killigrew inscribed in the 1664 folio edition of his plays were made to accommodate the newly emerging type of venues, and asserts that the “great interest” of the folio “lies in the relationship it demonstrates between the private playhouses of the early Caroline period, and the public theatres of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century.”

More than fifty years have elapsed since Worcester College Library, Oxford, acquired Thomas Killigrew's copy of the 1664 folio of his own plays.¹ Almost all the plays are annotated in Killigrew's hand. Only two of them—The Princess and The Prisoners—escaped his pencil entirely. The two parts of Cicilia and Clorinda were untouched except for a preliminary instruction to his copyist. Claricilla was subjected to cuts...