Of the fate of Rhodes nothing further is recorded.  He was the first to give back to Londoners a theatre they might visit legally and safely; and that done, he is heard of no more.  Killigrew and Davenant were soon invested with patent rights, and entitled to a monopoly of theatrical management in London; probably they prospered by displacing Rhodes—­but so much cannot be positively asserted.

The drama was now out of its difficulties.  Yet the influence and effect of these did not soon abate.  Upon them followed indeed a sort of after-crop of troubles, seriously injurious to the stage.  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.  There was a demand for tragedies of the French school—­with rhyming lines and artificial sentiment—­for comedies of intrigue and equivoque, after a foreign pattern, in lieu of our old English plays of wit, humour, and character.  Plagiarism, translation, and adaptation took up a secure position on the stage.  The leading playwrights of the Restoration—­Dryden, Shadwell, Durfey, Wycherley—­all borrowed freely from the French.  Dryden frankly apologised—­he was required to produce so many plays all could not be of his own inventing.  The King encouraged appropriation of foreign works.  He drew Sir Samuel Tuke’s attention to an admired Spanish comedy, advising its adaptation to the English stage:  the result was “The Adventures of Five Hours,” a work very highly esteemed by Mr. Pepys.  The introduction of scenery was due in a great measure to French example, although “paintings in perspective” had already been seen in an English theatre.  But now scenery was imperatively necessary to a dramatic performance, and a sort of passion arose for mechanical devices and decorative appliances of a novel kind.  Dryden was no reformer—­in truth, to suit his own purposes, he pandered laboriously to the follies and caprices of his patrons; nevertheless, he was fully sensible of the errors of the time, and often chronicles these in his prologues and epilogues.  He writes: 

True wit has run its best days long ago,
It ne’er looked up since we were lost in show,
When sense in doggrel rhymes and clouds was lost,
And dulness nourished at the actor’s cost. 
Nor stopped it here; when tragedy was done,
Satire and humour the same fate have run,
And comedy is sunk to trick and pun.