Editing Stuart Restoration (section)

===Spectacular===
{{Main|Restoration spectacular}}

[[Image:Settle-Morocco-detail.png|thumb|250px|This naval battle was one of the sets for [[Elkanah Settle]]'s ''Empress of Morocco'' (1673) at [[Dorset Garden Theatre|the theatre in Dorset Garden]].]]
The '''Restoration spectacular''', or elaborately staged '''machine play''', hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, [[baroque illusionistic painting]], gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented numbers and left them dazzled and delighted.<ref>{{Cite thesis |last=Bakewell |first=Lyndsey |title=Changing scenes and flying machines: re-examination of spectacle and the spectacular in Restoration theatre, 1660–1714 |date=2016 |degree=PhD. Diss. Loughborough University |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200212175057/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5c52/dfd2b876951f2d9ca982a2aa2460f52c228f.pdf}}</ref>

Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court [[masque]], though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from [[French opera]], the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera". However, the variety of them is so untidy that most theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre at all.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hume |first=Robert D. |title=The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century |date=1976 |page=205}}</ref> Only a handful of works of this period are usually accorded the term "opera", as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover [[Samuel Pepys]].{{Sfn|Hume|1976|pages=206–209}}</ref>

The expense of mounting ever more elaborate scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco such as [[John Dryden]]'s ''[[Albion and Albanius]]'' would leave a company in serious debt, while blockbusters like [[Thomas Shadwell]]'s ''Psyche'' or Dryden's ''[[King Arthur (opera)|King Arthur]]'' would put it comfortably in the black for a long time.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Milhous |first=Judith |title=Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708 |date=1979 |publisher=Southern Illinois University Press |pages=47–48}}</ref>