Authority is, for certain, hardly the first attribute that springs to mind for most Restoration dramatists. Of the 600 or so known plays and entertainments written between the Restoration of Charles II and the death of Queen Anne, only a small proportion are known today by more than a handful of specialists. The same is inevitably true of the people who wrote them. Approximately 200 playwrights were active, however briefly, in the period from 1660 to 1714, but the names of fewer than thirty enjoy any sort of currency today. One-tenth of the known plays of the period are anonymous. Substantially more are by authors with only a single, invariably doomed attempt to their names. They might be doctors or critics, actors or impresarios, hacks or aristocrats. Even clergymen tried – and failed. The Reverend Joseph Arrowsmith’s sole play, The Reformation, staged by the Duke’s Company in 1672 with a heavyweight cast, ‘quickly made its Exit’.

Arrowsmith’s play was less significant than what its existence tells us about Restoration Theatre, which fostered the contributions of large numbers of amateur playwrights with little chance of enjoying more than three hours’ exposure. Necessary and disposable, they were creatures of the prevailing appetite for novelty. Pepys relates how a Navy Office colleague, Silas Taylor, caught the bug. Antiquary, naval storekeeper, musician and captain, Taylor tried his hand with a play prophetically subtitled and hoped to persuade the Duke’s Company to take it. Henry Harris, by then joint manager, said he would judge it by the first act, a reasonable response that Pepys and Taylor thought rather mean. Taylor huffily took the play to the King’s Company and told Pepys, with the bravado of the failed writer, that ‘it will be acted there, though…they are not yet agreed upon it’. That night Pepys asked his wife, Elizabeth, to start reading the play to him as they sat in the garden – the last that has been heard of The Serenade, or, Disappointment. Even the loyal Pepys did not finish it.