From the time of the miracle cycles and the morality plays songs have been used for the embellishment of English tragedy. As the drama developed, lyrics in plays came to have functional as well as decorative or merely divertive significance, until with Shakespeare their dramatic values acquired subtlety, and songs became an integral part of the technique of comedy and tragedy. The rôle of song in the plays of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries to 1642, and especially in those of Shakespeare himself, has been analyzed with great detail, but there has been no account of the projection of songs into the drama of the Restoration, when with neo-classic emphasis on regularity and a body of tragedies essentially classical in form, one might expect altered usage of previously established conventions or even an astringent use of song itself.