Courtly Shakespeare, III

Dobson again: “after Charles II’s death in 1685 England would never again have another monarch with such an informed interest in the drama (or, mercifully, such a lascivious one), and deprived of royal patronage and protection the playhouses came under renewed attack from the moralists (led by the redoubtable clergyman Jeremy Collier), who wanted the threatre at best stringently reformed and at worst closed down altogether. Nor surprisingly, the occasional new adaptations of unfamiliar Shakespeare plays produced in the wake of Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) . . . are quick to present themselves as impeccably virtuous, and are even more thoroughgoing than their predecessors in excising vulgar low comedy.”