to see how the house did fill. 
    Good easy judging souls! with what delight
    They would expect a jig or target fight;
    A furious tale of Troy, which they ne’er thought
    Was weakly written so ’twere strongly fought.

As to the playgoers of the Restoration we have abundant information from the poet Dryden, and the diarist Pepys.  For some eighteen years the theatres had been absolutely closed, and during that interval very great changes had occurred.  England, under Charles II., seemed as a new and different country to the England of preceding monarchs.  The restored king and his courtiers brought with them from their exile in France strange manners, and customs, and tastes.  The theatre they favoured was scarcely the theatre that had flourished in England before the Civil War.  Dryden reminds the spectators, in one of his prologues—­

    You now have habits, dances, scenes, and rhymes,
    High language often, ay, and sense sometimes.

There was an end of dramatic poetry, as it was understood under Elizabeth.  Blank verse had expired or swooned away, never again to be wholly reanimated.  Fantastic tragedies in rhyme, after the French pattern, became the vogue; and absolute translations from the French and Spanish for the first time occupied the English stage.  Shakespeare and his colleagues had converted existing materials to dramatic uses, but not as did the playwrights of the Restoration.  In the Epilogue to the comedy of “An Evening’s Love; or, The Mock Astrologer,” borrowed from “Le Feint Astrologue” of the younger Corneille, Dryden, the adapter of the play, makes jesting defence of the system of adaptation.  The critics are described as conferring together in the pit on the subject of the performance: 

                        They kept a fearful stir
    In whispering that he stole the Astrologer: 
    And said, betwixt a French and English plot,
    He eased his half-tired muse on pace and trot. 
    Up starts a Monsieur, new come o’er, and warm
    In the French stoop and pull-back of the arm: 
    “Morbleu,” dit-il, and cocks, “I am a rogue,
    But he has quite spoiled the ‘Feigned Astrologue!’”

The poet is supposed to make excuse: 

    He neither swore, nor stormed, as poets do,
    But, most unlike an author, vowed ’twas true;
    Yet said he used the French like enemies,
    And did not steal their plots but made them prize.

Dryden concludes with a sort of apology for his own productiveness, and the necessity of borrowing that it involved: 

    He still must write, and banquier-like, each day
    Accept new bills, and he must break or pay. 
    When through his hands such sums must yearly run,
    You cannot think the stock is all his own.