It seems certain that for some few years prior to the Restoration there had been far less stringent treatment of the players than in the earlier days of the triumph of Puritanism.  Cromwell, perhaps, rather despised the stage than condemned it seriously on religious grounds; the while he did not object to indulge in buffoonery and horseplay, even in the gallery of Whitehall.  Some love of music he has been credited with, and this, perhaps, induced him to tolerate the operatic dramas of Sir William Davenant, which obtained representation during the Commonwealth:  such as “The History of Sir Francis Drake,” “represented by instrumental and vocal music, and by art of Perspective in Scenes,” and “The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru.”  According to Langbaine, the two plays called “The Siege of Rhodes” were likewise acted "in stilo recitativo" during the time of the Civil Wars, and upon the Restoration were rewritten and enlarged for regular performance at the Duke of York’s Theatre, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  It seems to have been held that a play was no longer a play if its words were sung instead of spoken—­or these representations of Davenant’s works may have been altogether stealthy, and without the cognisance of the legal authorities of the time.  Isaac Disraeli, however, has pointed out that in some verses, published in 1653, and prefixed to the plays of Richard Brome, there is evident a tone of exultation at the passing away of power from the hands of those who had oppressed the actors.  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.  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.