“Matters of state,” observed Charles II's poet laureate John Dryden, “are canvassed on the stage, and things of concernment there managed.” His literary and political nemesis Thomas Shadwell agreed that “plays and ballads have reform'd the state!” “'Tis thought the stage / Breeds more opinions, and produces far / More heresies than the late Civil War,” concurred another observer of Restoration drama. Using the same super-charged language, one of Shadwell's stage creations complained that “the wits are as bad as the divines, and have made such civil wars, that the little nation is almost undone.” Naturally each playwright accused his opponents of having politicized the stage. Thomas Otway, for example, writing immediately after the Exclusion Crisis, sneered that “it is not long since in the noisy pit / Tumultuous faction sat the judge of wit; / There knaves applauded what their blockheads writ. / At a Whig-brother's play, the bawling crowd / Burst out in shouts, as zealous, and as loud, / As when some member's stout election-beer / Gains the mad voice of a whole drunken shire.” After the Glorious Revolution, Thomas Shadwell countered that the stage was until recently dominated by the “loyal writers of the last two reigns, / Who tir'd their pens for Popery and chains.”

While it has long been known that Restoration drama was heavily politicized, very few scholars have asked serious questions about the political content of that drama.