Editing Restoration comedy (section)

==Theatre companies==
===Original patent companies, 1660–1682===
[[File:Stage of Dorset Garden Theatre set for "The Empress of Morocco" (1673).png|thumb|upright|The sumptuously decorated Dorset Gardens playhouse in 1673, with one of the sets for [[Elkannah Settle]]'s ''[[The Empress of Morocco]]''. The [[thrust stage|apron stage]] at the front which allowed intimate audience contact is not visible in the picture (the artist is standing on it).]]
Charles II was an active and interested patron of drama. Soon after his restoration in 1660 he granted exclusive staging rights, so-called [[letters patent|Royal patents]], to the [[King's Company]] and the [[Duke's Company]], led by two middle-aged [[Charles I of England|Caroline]] playwrights, [[Thomas Killigrew]] and [[William Davenant]]. The patentees scrambled for performance rights to the previous generation's [[James I of England|Jacobean]] and Caroline plays, as the first necessity for economic survival before any new plays existed. Their next priority was to build splendid [[patent theatre]]s in [[Drury Lane]] and [[Dorset Gardens]], respectively. Striving to outdo each other, Killigrew and Davenant ended with quite similar theatres, both designed by [[Christopher Wren]], both optimally providing music and dancing, and both fitted with moveable scenery and elaborate machines for thunder, lightning, and waves.<ref>Hume, 19–21.</ref>

The Restoration dramatists renounced the tradition of satire recently embodied by [[Ben Jonson]], devoting themselves to the [[comedy of manners]].<ref name="Hodgart2009p194">Hodgart (2009) [https://books.google.com/books?id=dGrCooK63TsC&pg=PA194 pp. 194 and 189.]</ref>

The audience of the early Restoration period was not exclusively [[noble court|courtly]], as has sometimes been supposed, but it was quite small and could barely support two companies. There was no untapped reserve of occasional playgoers. Ten consecutive performances constituted a success. This closed system forced playwrights to respond strongly to popular taste. Fashions in drama would change almost week by week rather than season by season, as each company responded to the offerings of the other, and new plays were urgently sought. In this hectic climate the new [[genre]]s of [[heroic drama]], [[she-tragedy|pathetic drama]] and Restoration comedy were born and flourished.<ref>Hume, 17, 23.</ref>

===United Company, 1682–1695===
Both the quantity and quality of drama suffered in 1682 when the more successful Duke's Company absorbed the struggling King's Company to form the ''United Company''. Production of new plays dropped off sharply in the 1680s, affected by the monopoly and the political situation (see [[#Decline of comedy, 1678–90|Decline of comedy]] below). The influence and incomes of actors dropped too.<ref>Milhous, 38–48.</ref> In the late 1680s, predatory investors ("adventurers") converged on the United Company. Management was taken over by the lawyer [[Christopher Rich (theatre manager)|Christopher Rich]], who tried to finance a tangle of "farmed" shares and sleeping partners by slashing salaries and dangerously by abolishing traditional perks of senior performers, who were stars with the clout to fight back.<ref>Milhous, pp. 51–55.</ref>

===War of the theatres, 1695–1700===
The company owners, wrote the young United Company employee [[Colley Cibber]], "had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presum'd they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people. [They] did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public were inclined to support."<ref>Milhous, p. 66.</ref> Performers like the legendary [[Thomas Betterton]], the tragedienne [[Elizabeth Barry]] and the rising young comedian [[Anne Bracegirdle]] had the audience on their side, and confident of this walked out.<ref>Milhous, pp. 68–74.</ref>

The actors gained a Royal "licence to perform", so bypassing Rich's ownership of the original Duke's and King's Company patents from 1660 and forming their own cooperative company. This venture was set up with detailed rules for avoiding arbitrary managerial authority, regulating the ten actors' shares, setting the conditions of salaried employees and the sickness and retirement benefits of both categories. The cooperative had the good luck to open in 1695 with the première of [[William Congreve (playwright)|William Congreve]]'s famous ''Love For Love'' and the skill to make it a huge box-office success.<ref>Milhous, pp. 52–55.</ref>

London again had two competing companies. Their dash to attract audiences briefly revitalised Restoration drama, but also set it on a fatal slope to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Rich's company notoriously offered [[Bartholomew Fair]]-type attractions – high kickers, jugglers, rope dancers, performing animals – while the co-operating actors, while appealing to snobbery by setting themselves up as the one legitimate theatre company in London, were not above retaliating with "prologues recited by boys of five and epilogues declaimed by ladies on horseback".<ref>Dobrée, xxi.</ref>