Restoration Stage, Coffee Houses and Women in Public Life

From Closed Theatres to Royal Patents

In 1642 the Puritan Parliament had ordered London’s theatres closed; in 1660 Charles II reopened them. He did so by issuing two royal letters patent, granting a near-monopoly on professional drama in London to two companies: the King’s Company under Thomas Killigrew, and the Duke’s Company under William Davenant. For most of the reign, only these two licensed playhouses could perform new spoken drama. Theatre was therefore not an open market — it was a piece of court patronage.

Women on the Stage from 1660–61

A second royal letter, issued by Charles in 1662, made it explicit: women’s parts were to be played by women. Before 1660, female roles had been performed by boys. The first known professional actress on the public English stage was probably Margaret Hughes, playing Desdemona in ‘Othello’ on 8 December 1660. Within a few years a generation of star actresses — including Nell Gwyn, who became Charles II’s mistress, and Elizabeth Barry, the leading tragedienne of the next generation — was working full-time in London.

Key Fact

In 1660 Charles II granted patents to the King’s Company (Killigrew) and the Duke’s Company (Davenant), creating a two-theatre monopoly in London. From December 1660 women played female roles professionally for the first time in English history.

Restoration Comedy

Restoration comedy was the period’s defining new genre. Plays such as Etherege’s ‘The Man of Mode’ (1676), Wycherley’s ‘The Country Wife’ (1675) and Congreve’s ‘The Way of the World’ (1700) used witty dialogue, sexual intrigue and satire of fashionable London society. The plots were often bawdy, the characters self-aware, and the audience overwhelmingly drawn from the elite. Theatres were small (around 700 seats), candlelit, and rowdy; the king himself often attended, sometimes accompanied by his mistresses.

Female playwrights also broke through. Aphra Behn became the first English woman to make a living from writing. Her plays — ‘The Rover’ (1677) is the most famous — were box-office successes; her novel ‘Oroonoko’ (1688), an early prose narrative about an enslaved African prince, has been read ever since. Behn was attacked for her sex (Pope later sneered that ‘the stage how loosely does Astraea tread’), but she earned, lived independently, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

A typical performance began at 3:30 p.m. and lasted around three hours. Audiences ate oranges (sold by ‘orange-girls’ — Nell Gwyn famously started as one) and chatted through the play. The pit, occupied by gentlemen and writers, faced raked seating in the boxes. New plays alternated with revivals of Shakespeare in heavily adapted forms: William Davenant rewrote ‘Macbeth’ with singing witches, and Nahum Tate gave ‘King Lear’ a happy ending in 1681 that held the stage for over 150 years. Spectacle and scenery — new movable flats, lit by candles — meant Restoration theatre looked very different from the bare Globe of Shakespeare’s day.

Coffee Houses: London’s Penny Universities

The first London coffee house had opened in 1652, before the Restoration; by the 1670s the city had over 80, by 1700 several hundred. A coffee house was open to any man who could pay a penny for a dish of coffee. Newspapers were laid out free, gossip and political news circulated, and particular trades came to cluster in particular houses: Edward Lloyd’s, opened in 1686, grew into the centre of marine insurance, and Jonathan’s, opened around 1680, became the home of stock-jobbing. Contemporaries called them penny universities because the conversation was an education for the price of a drink.

Charles II disliked them. In December 1675 he issued a royal proclamation suppressing coffee houses on the grounds that they encouraged sedition and idleness. The reaction was immediate: shopkeepers, customers and judges objected, and the proclamation was withdrawn within days. The episode shows both the perceived political power of the coffee houses and the limits of royal control over public opinion.

Coffee houses were almost always male spaces: women normally entered only as servers or as the wives running the business. A 1674 satirical pamphlet, ‘The Women’s Petition Against Coffee’, mocked husbands for spending all day talking politics rather than at home; an answering ‘Men’s Petition’ replied in kind. The exclusion of women from this central new public space contrasts sharply with the new visibility of actresses on the stage and shows that the ‘public sphere’ opened up unevenly.

The Status of Women

For most women the legal framework remained the doctrine of coverture: a married woman could not own property, sign contracts or sue in her own right. But the visible gains were real. Actresses became celebrities; female playwrights and poets such as Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips earned by their writing; women published in print on religion (the Quaker Margaret Fell argued for women’s right to preach); and royal mistresses such as Barbara Villiers and Louise de Kéroualle exerted real political influence at court. Restoration culture is therefore a story of widened public visibility against unchanged underlying law — a tension worth holding in any answer about women’s status.