The twenty years before the Civil War are usually thought of as a time when the theatres were dominated by a courtly elegant Cavalier drama, or by light comedy foreshadowing that of the Restoration – the work, for example, of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shirley, Davenant and Brome. Much of what was shown, at court and in the indoor theatres especially, was indeed sophisticated entertainment for a leisured and fashionable public. Some of it was certainly escapist, unserious, sexually titillating. Yet to see, say, Beaumont and Fletcher as merely creating a fairy-tale world is too simple. They write for Jacobean courtiers and sophisticated men-about-town: and as an acute critic puts it, ‘their plays strike roots deep into a real world…Their “unreality” for us amounts to a criticism of much more than the two dramatists concerned. It is a judgment too of the habits of mind of an actual section of a historical society.’

Nevertheless, the kind of criticism of Crown and court that did find dramatic expression in these years was potentially more serious and far-reaching than the ‘first wave’ of satirical attacks, mainly by the children's companies, in the opening years of James' reign. In the earlier period, plays in the private theatres had jeered at Scottish favourites, the sale of knighthoods, monopolies and even at the King's personal habits, ‘so that it would make any afraid to hear them’. Later, especially after the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, companies at the public and popular theatres made a number of attempts to handle the central issues of policy and outlook in dispute between Crown and Parliament – a much more dangerous development.