Theatre Music

Abstract

Abstract ONE of Charles H’s first acts on his return to London was to authorize the reopening of the theatres, closed since the beginning of the Civil War in 1642. On 21 August 1660 Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant, the leading survivors of the pre-war London theatre, were granted a patent allowing them to form two companies under the patronage of the king and the Duke of York. This was something new. There had been companies under court patronage in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, and Charles I granted Davenant a patent to build a theatre in 1639, a project never realized. But from 1660 the two companies enjoyed a monopoly of theatrical activity in London (it persisted until the nineteenth century, despite many vicissitudes and attempts to circumvent it), and they were supported by the king, who took an interest in their affairs, and regularly patronized them in person. His father, by contrast, had never set foot in a commercial play house.